


Breaking Horses

by brightstarlings (gingerpunches)



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Fluff and Humor, Hurt Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Hurt/Comfort, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani and Nicky | Nicolò di Genova Acting Like a Married Couple, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani and Nicky | Nicolò di Genova are in Love, Light Angst, M/M, Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani Friendship, Nile Freeman & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova Friendship, Nile Freeman Needs a Hug, POV Andy | Andromache of Scythia, POV Nile Freeman, Post-Movie: The Old Guard (2020), Protective Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Soft Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Soft Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Team as Family, and they love and protect her a lot, for most of this, for some of this as well, joe and nicky are nile's big brothers, my girlfriend and i are co-writing things together and then this happened
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 08:02:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 50,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27639953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingerpunches/pseuds/brightstarlings
Summary: “We can help you,” Joe pleads. He is always so strong, so emotional. Nile has stopped unpacking, frozen where she’s sitting on the pristine, white couch of the sterile apartment Copley found for them on short notice. She’s staring at Joe as if seeing him for the first time, and honestly, she is. “Book — we can help you. Please, tell us, let us know what we can do —““No,” Booker says. He shakes his head. He’s looking between Joe and Nicky, at the space deliberately put between them, at the spaceheput there. “No, I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”“Mi amore,” Nicky tries, reaching out again to Joe. Andy can see the streaks of blood on his arms, his cheek, caking the back of his head. He’d been shot, Joe said.You shot Nicky. You shouldn’t have done that.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 73
Kudos: 243





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this. is a nightmare.
> 
> i wrote this in tandem with my girlfriend, who is writing her own novel. this started as my attempt to answer the question andy has: why they're immortal, and why them. then i realized that's kind of the antithesis to the point of the old guard, so now this is turning into a found family fic, which i'm enjoying a lot more.
> 
> that said: this is very much a nicky/joe fic with nicky and joe being awesome big brothers to nile. nile needs support, and nicky and joe are the most adjusted of the guard. andy and booker find some common ground here, and booker gets the redemption he needs. 
> 
> as always with TOG fics: nicky and joe, as my personal headcanon, think in their mother tongues. they use a lot of endearments in these languages to refer to each other. i've done my best to limit the arabic i use, because it is my understanding that translated arabic is stiff and formal. joe and nicky more or less use it strictly for endearments in this fic. if you find issues, let me know and i will fix them. i am not here to offend anyone - i am here to learn and grow just as you are. 
> 
> and as per usual, any mistakes left over are my own. beta read by my wonderful girlfriend. leave comments to let me know what you think!

There had come a time where questions held no meaning.

To ask was to be human — it’s what they did best. To ask was to be curious, to have a need to know beyond simply knowing. To ask was to expand the horizons of one’s world, and if everyone did the asking, the world was limitless.

At first, religion filled that role. She’d seen it often enough. If the sky held no answers, then surely something beyond could — surely there existed a power that could explain our earthly lot in life. The winds shift the seasons, the stars cradle the heavens, and with the changing of the tide came new days, months, years. A cycle could be found in all things, but humans were the exception, and to ask was to be found wanting.

But Gods could never want. They create and let loose, and she finds, after a time, that even without their existence, humans would find a way to answer their own questions. There had to be more, they said. There had to be more to  _ us. _

She believed it for a while. Like her mother had, and her mother before her. There had been a time where the wind whispered stories and the birds sang curses, and never had there been any doubt about where it all came from.

There hadn’t been a need. The Earth gave them everything, and it was enough to simply listen.

Even during peace.

Especially during war.

Answers were easy, then, during war. We were right. They were wrong. Our gods held us aloft, revered us as holy — we knew why we were created. But to take and to give were things humans did, and to take a life, to assume ourselves so arrogant to take the place of Death themselves, was among the easier answers to give.

She knew it. She’s known it since the first time she died and came back, sputtering and gasping, soaked in blood and mud and more alone than she will ever be in her long, long life.

War was the answer. Questions had no meaning when the flash of a blade could end it all just as quickly.

——

Meaning, then, held nothing. There  _ was _ nothing, even when she was worshipped as a god. Even as the millenia passed and her dreams showed her answers she wouldn’t come to understand for thousands of years. 

It was nothing.  _ She _ was nothing.

Until she was.

(And wasn’t.)

——

She meets them on a hot, dry day in the twelfth century.

It was a Sunday. Of course it was. Their lives held little meaning beyond solving the petty squabbles of man and saving a life that needed saving. Quynh had long stopped asking why they did what they did. Andromache never stopped asking, but she did it quietly. After Lykon, there was no sense dredging oceans when simple answers would do.

(She knows, in her heart of hearts, there’s a reason. There has to be a reason they have this gift, this curse. There had to be a reason why they woke from death and wandered alone, separate from humanity and bound by its intricacies all at once. There had to be a reason why they were saddled with this walking death, this inhumanity she wouldn’t wish on her nonexistent enemies.

To ask was to be found wanting. She kept asking, and she keeps finding she wants entirely too much.)

They’d been dreaming of each other for several decades. The two men had changed, growing from blood thirsty, screaming faces in her nightmares to gentle, kind souls in her dreams. She wonders idly as they cross paths for the first time if they’d dreamed of Lykon until his untimely end, and then she shakes the thought away.

“We’ve dreamt of you,” the first man says. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, with wispy brown hair. His Arabic is heavily accented but beautiful — the only language he seems to fall back on between himself and his companion as they murmur to each other. Andromache appreciates it, for she was there when it formed, and her mouth knows how to shape the words better than most spoken languages these days.

“And we of you,” Quynh says. Her Arabic is beautiful, lilting, just like the first man’s. “You know, I thought you were taller.” 

She’s looking at the second man. He laughs, full and with unmeasured delight. The first man looks at him like he hung the stars in the sky. 

“I have a feeling we will get along,” the second man says. He drops from the back of his horse, and with the sound of his feet hitting the sand, they all dismount. Common ground is reached when they meet between each other, grasping hands and then shoulders. Familiarity has long grown between them now — their dreams had assured it.

It’s as close to home as she has ever come. The dreams had long lost the unpleasantness they had in the beginning, tinged with heartache and rage and regret. She has known these men better than most she will ever meet, even though this is the first time they have seen each other outside their dreams. Sliding her arms around them feels right, feels  _ real,  _ and for the first time since she woke into eternity, she feels seen. 

These men know what has happened to them. They carry the same intimate weight, the same aches and pains. They have died hundreds of times by now, have watched cities rise and fall. Their birth countries are not the same, if they even exist anymore, and likely do not have any surviving descendents left, if they deigned to care. It has been nearly a hundred years since Andromache first dreamed of them, and seeing them now, as they are, she sees herself and Quynh reflected in them.

“It’s nice to finally meet you,” the second man says into Andromache’s ear. His beard is softer against her skin than she’d imagined, almost as soft as his voice. 

“I am Andromache,” Andromache says. She gestures to Quynh beside her. “And this is Quynh.”

“Yusuf,” the second man says. He holds his hand out to the first man, taking his hand. “And Nicolò.”

Nicolò dips his chin. Andromache, feeling the last dregs of instinctual fear draining out of her, reaches for Quynh as well.

It’s fate, Nicolò will say later. Not that day, or that week or that month — not even that year. It will be a long time before he’s brave enough to have such an open discussion with her and Quynh, but it does, and when he says it —  _ It’s fate  _ — she believes him.

Like her, like Quynh, they had long believed destiny drew them together. Not God, maybe — they had discussed at length how their Gods may not exist, but their own existence, this immortality, made it so, even when they came from such different cultural backgrounds — but destiny. The thread tying them all together. A force so true and powerful that even in their dreams they see each other long before they meet.

“And that doesn’t scare you?” she says one night. Nicolò had offered to take first watch. He sleeps lightly, unlike his other half, something Andromache shares with him. It’s funny the things mirrored between them — the passion Quynh and Yusuf are not afraid of showing, the reserved kindness herself and Nicolò are more prone to giving. 

“Fate?” Nicolò asks. She nods as she settles against the low stone wall beside him. His smile is small and wry when she looks up at him. “No. With Yusuf — with you and Quynh — not much scares me.”

“And God?”

“Has much more to fear from me than I of him.” He turns, glancing at the sleeping forms of Quynh and Yusuf on their bedrolls. He always looks so soft when looking at Yusuf, so much younger than his years. When he died the first time, he couldn’t have been older than thirty. She envies this of him, because she can barely remember what her mother looked like now, let alone the age she could possibly be.

Having a God or not doesn’t scare her much, either. She sees what he means. They have seen so much, lived so much, that their very nature demanded something greater than them existed. Why them, she finds herself asking? Why me?

It had been a question that haunted her for millenia in the beginning. When it was just her, alone. When there were no calendars, no months or years to count the ways humans kept changing. The Earth was the Earth, and the stars were the stars, and whispered in the trees was the will of the gods. She was alone save her own heartbeat, a rhythm that, over time, grew to match the thrum of time as it passed under her feet.

She’d been alone for so long that the answer to her question didn’t matter after a while. Sitting here with Nicolò, under the stars still so familiar to the ones she stared at so long ago, she finds that the answer had simply taken a while to get to her.

——

Yusuf and Nicolò travel with them for centuries. It’s during the sixteenth century they lose Quynh. Andromache’s heart, her soul, her better half — all that she was and more. Thrown into the ocean in an iron maiden, doomed to drown for eternity. They search for years, decades, time shifting beneath them like water, like sand. But the answers fade away, leaving nothing but what’s left behind.

——

After Merrick, sleeping is somehow more difficult.

_ Somehow _ is a word she uses to assuage some guilt to the situation, but she knows deep down that’s not how this is. They have Nile now, and the combined weight of her presence (not a bad one) and the aftermath of Booker’s betrayal (a much, much worse one) leaves them unsure of what to do.

But she is Andromache of Scythia.  _ Somehow  _ is not a word she says aloud, only using it in the confines of her own head as she glances between her shattered, exhausted family, searching for something that is no longer there. Maybe it hadn’t been for a while, and  _ somehow,  _ that’s worse.

“I’ll take first watch,” Booker says. Quietly, as he does all things, his voice barely rising above the shuffle of their boots on the hardwood and their bags dropping off their shoulders.

Andy knows what’s going to happen before the air snaps with the metal tang of tension the moment Booker’s words leave his mouth. She glances at Joe, at the flat line of his shoulders, the blood and dust caking his shirt, and immediately she has to fight to keep herself quiet. 

She told him in the lab that there was a time and place. Now is the time, and the place.

“As if I’d let you alone while the rest of us slept,” Joe hisses. He doesn’t turn to look at Booker, dismissing him even as he continues. “As if I’d let you alone with anything other than my sword in your goddamn  _ neck —“ _

“Yusuf, please,” Nicky sighs tiredly. He reaches out, but the slide of his hand down Joe’s arm seems to only enrage him instead of calm him.

“No!” Joe shouts. He shakes off Nicky’s hand, and the hurt that flashes on his face is enough to drive a knife of hot steel through Andy’s chest. As it is, she sits back, helping Nile go through their things as their young immortal glances across to the three men. 

“What he did is worse than betrayal!” Joe continues. He throws a hand out at Booker, pleading with the rise of his voice. “You could have said something — anything — and we would have understood! We would have done anything for you if you simply asked!”

Booker shakes his head. “You couldn’t,” he starts.

“We could!”

“And how could you help us?” Booker says. “The grief of being alone — of knowing all we had was no one but ourselves. We have each other, but what is that in the face of all we’ve lost?”

He turns pleading eyes to Andy, but she shakes her head.  _ There is no us _ , she says. Not anymore. Not after today. The light in Booker’s eyes dims, and for the first time she sees him realize the gravity of what he’s done.

He looks at Joe and Nicky. The two men, the two  _ brothers _ , whom he had allowed to be captured. For two hundred years they had stood by him, guided him, taught him all that they knew and been taught in return. She sees in them a brotherhood she couldn’t achieve because of her position as their boss, their leader, their mother. She sees in them a bond of friendship stretching so far ahead she can’t spot the end no matter how hard she squints.

But she also sees how Nicky holds himself, tense and wound tighter than he should. Standing apart from Joe, allowing the space to grow wide between them, yawning and threatening to swallow all that they are, that they have been. Joe is a tightened spring, ignoring the pleas of his soul beside him, for once strange and out of tune from the man that has always stood beside him since the very beginning.

_ “You and Nicky always had each other,”  _ Booker had said. With venom in his voice, with heart-stricken grief and regret even as he spoke the words she would never imagine saying herself. In that moment, she felt sickly vindicated. In the next, she had turned her head and seen the looks on Nicky and Joe’s faces, seen the bond between them shatter just enough to see her reflection. She has never hated herself more than she had in that moment in the lab. She won’t ever forgive herself, even as she sees them try to forgive her, forgive  _ Booker. _

“We can help you,” Joe pleads. He is always so strong, so emotional. Nile has stopped unpacking, frozen where she’s sitting on the pristine, white couch of the sterile apartment Copley found for them on short notice. She’s staring at Joe as if seeing him for the first time, and honestly, she is. “Book — we can help you. Please, tell us, let us know what we can do —“

“No,” Booker says. He shakes his head. He’s looking between Joe and Nicky, at the space deliberately put between them, at the space  _ he _ put there. “No, I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“ _ Mi amore _ ,” Nicky tries, reaching out again to Joe. Andy can see the streaks of blood on his arms, his cheek, caking the back of his head. He’d been shot, Joe said.  _ You shot Nicky. You shouldn’t have done that. _

It makes her sick, what’s been done. Her own wounds are nothing, now. Her mortality is nothing compared to the damage that has been done by Booker’s hands.

“Please,” Joe pleads. He’s ignoring Nicky, his hand held out to Booker. Booker is his brother and his brother has hurt him, has hurt the man he loves, and still he’s extending friendship, brotherhood, belonging. She stares, transfixed, like Nile, as Joe begs for forgiveness he does not need.

It is no surprise that Booker denies it. He shakes his head again, concrete dust whuffing down from his hair, his shoulders. “I’ll take the first watch,” he says tonelessly, then picks up his bag. He looks at Joe, then, frozen to the spot. Really looks, then to Nicky, like being asked to be forgiven was too much even when it was being extended to him. Nicky nods, like he understands, and then Booker is moving silently down the hall to check the other rooms before disappearing into one of the two bathrooms.

Nicky sways on his feet as the tension rushes out of the room after Booker. Joe reaches out, finally, blessedly, and steadies him with one wide palm across the center of his back. Andy feels herself breathe when they touch, and beside her, Nile exhales.

“What he did,” Nile says quietly. “At Goussainville?”

Andy nods. “Probably before. Probably back in Sudan.”

Nile doesn’t pretend to understand, but she nods. Her eyes don’t truly leave Joe’s hand as his fingers begin to curl into Nicky’s shirt. “You couldn’t have known.”

“I should have,” Andy says. “He’s wrong for what he did, but I should have known. I should have seen it.”

“You couldn’t,” Nicky says. His voice is low, tired, and Andy remembers how long it’s been since she’s seen him. Two days he’s been strapped to a table and tortured, unable to resist or protect himself. He’d died, surely, on that table, but instead of seeking comfort from his other half, he keeps them apart. The one point of contact between them is Joe’s fist in his shirt as Joe leans on the kitchen island counter, trying to breathe, trying to calm down.

It hurts her. She remembers Quynh. Trapped in an iron maiden at the bottom of the ocean, a nightmare for Booker to remember every night, and now a burden Nile must bear. She couldn’t reach for the same comfort she knows Nicky desires, couldn’t find solace in the embrace she longs for every night of her existence, but to look at him and feel anger and disgust? To look at him and  _ blame _ him for all the misgivings their immortality has wrought upon them?

She hates Booker for one blissful, arrogant moment. How could he look upon the one sole beacon of love and forgiveness in their lives and feel resentment? How could he look at his brothers and feel so wronged that giving them up to be tortured was worth more than the eternity they had together?

“Nicky,” she says quietly. He turns to her on instinct, following her voice as he always has since the day they met. It jostles Joe’s hand from him, and she regrets calling for his attention. She gestures for him to sit anyway. “Please.”

Nicky glances at Joe, then Andy. He’s unsure if he can touch, if what he seeks is alright with her, and she knows it’s not her that’s creating this apprehension but it still pains her. She nods, and he reaches for Joe, wrapping a hand around the nape of his neck, murmuring quietly in mixed Italian and Arabic. It takes only a few words and Joe is turning, obeying with little thought, following Nicky to sit on the couch across from Andy and Nile.

He looks wrecked, as she imagined. Dark tracks line his cheeks, tears cutting through the dust and blood on his face, and his curls are greyer with the remains of the fight clinging to him. He and Nicky both are riding on two days of no sleep and several deaths, and for a moment she considers letting them go to rest before talking to them. 

But she can’t. They deserve respite. Answers. Knowledge that they are not the progenitors to Booker’s — or her own — grief. Booker’s despair is his own, brought upon his own shoulders, a burden he alone must bear if he isn’t strong enough to ask for help.

She can’t deny her own, either, but it isn’t their fault. Love is never, ever something to be ashamed of. Especially near-nine hundred years of it.

“Nicky,” she starts. 

He startles. He looks up at her, attentive, and she is once again struck by the intensity of those sea-grey eyes on him. It is no wonder Joe gets lost in them day in and day out. 

She smiles at him, trying to keep it from being sad. Then she looks at Joe, softening her expression.

“Joe,” she says. “Will you look at me?”

He does. The gap between himself and Nicky on the couch, a scant six inches, screams at her. They were never apart. Booker did this.  _ She  _ did this.

“Boss?” Joe murmurs.

She shakes her head. “Andy.”

“Andy,” he repeats, and it sounds like forgiveness.

“I want you to look at Nicky,” she says. “And please don’t let him go. Don’t let this ruin you. Don’t let this be what draws you apart after so long.”

Nicky looks pained. Joe refuses to look at him, but it isn’t out of anger, of malice. He refuses to look because he doesn’t feel he’s allowed to, and it breaks Andy’s heart even more.

“Andy,” he tries, but she cuts him off.

“What Booker said is wrong. Our grief is not your fault. Our ability to cope is not your fault. I can’t imagine a world where the two of you aren’t together, and for my sake, please, don’t let me try to now. I don’t want to see the last years of my life pass by without the love you have for us and each other brightening it every day.”

“But we hurt you —“ Nicky says. “We were inconsiderate —“

“Love is not to be hidden,” she says. Stresses every word, puts the full force of herself behind them. Nicky quiets, and for the first time since getting to this apartment, Joe meets his eyes when he looks at him. Andy can’t help the smile on her face now.

“Please don’t hide,” she says softly. “You could never hurt me by being together. You remind me, every day, that there is something worth fighting for.”

It is a miracle that, after her words leave her, Joe reaches across the gap on the couch and grips Nicky’s knee. All at once, Nicky relaxes, and for the first time since Goussainville Andy sees  _ them _ again, Nicky and Joe, Joe and Nicky, whole and without a care in the world. When she looks beside her to Nile, Nile is smiling.

“I’ve never had two dads before,” she says quietly. Nicky huffs, trying to hide a grin, and Joe barks a startled laugh.

“We’re a little old to be your dads, but I would cherish the honor,  _ sorellina _ ,” Joe says. He’s smiling, truly smiling, and oh what a sight he makes. 

“Calling her little sister ruins the effect, I imagine,” Nicky says. He’s smiling, too, small like he always does. Andy wonders what she would have done if she couldn’t see these men smile again.

“I wouldn’t mind that either.” Nile smirks, then dumps the contents of the duffel she left at her feet. It’s full of clothes, most of them Joe and Nicky’s, but folded in between their nondescript tee shirts and jeans Nile picks out clothes meant for her.

“Thank you, Nile,” Nicky says quietly. Andy knows he means more than the clothes.

Nile’s smile turns soft. “I couldn’t leave you guys. Even when I —“

She looks at Andy. Andy shakes her head. Whatever she was going to do back at Copley’s, whether she was going to run away to sort herself out or go to her family to test her luck against their mortality and time itself, it’s all been forgiven already. Andy doesn’t have it in her to be bitter anymore.

Nile nods. She relaxes, tension bleeding out of her, and for the first time Andy sees how young she is. How  _ strong  _ she is. She hasn’t let herself feel it, but she loves this girl more than she can put into words.

“Thank you,” Joe says. “For coming back. And for such a spectacular end to the day. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a nose dive from the fifteenth floor of a secret lab.”

“Always a first,” Nicky says lightly.

Andy snorts. “And won’t be the last.”

Nile rolls her eyes. “I promise not to make it a habit.” She gathers her clothes and stands, pointedly tossing her braids over one shoulder. They’re stiff with blood — Andy doesn’t envy the time she must take to clean her hair. “Anyway, I call first shower. Ya’ll can fight over it after me.”

She slips down the hall to the first door on the left. Not long after the door clicks closed, the shower starts, leaving Andy alone with Joe and Nicky. 

A Joe and Nicky who haven’t closed the distance between them quite yet, still looking nervously at Andy like she may strike them for moving closer. She swallows her pride — pride built over six millennia of her existence — and for the first time in a long time, apologizes.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Nicky and Joe start, but stay quiet, glancing between each other. “For myself and for Booker. You didn’t deserve any of this.”

“It’s not like  _ you _ wanted us tortured,” Joe says. His light tone is forced, wrung out of him as if in necessity. Andy hates it even as she understands why. 

“No, but I didn’t look in my blind spots. You both suffered because of my own self-centered bullshit.”

Nicky looks at her as if her words physically pain him. “You’re allowed to hurt, Andy. We shouldn’t have been —“

“You did nothing wrong,” Andy cuts in. “Please. Let me take this, Nicky.”

Nicky bites his lip. He’s never been good at allowing such grief to hang over them for long, but she supposes she never allowed him the choice in ignoring it. Now she’s asking him to, asking him to deny a part of himself that is good and selfless for her own selfish need to prove that she’s right. Because while she hurts — while she aches with the loss of her own half, her own soul, left under the crushing weight of the oceans and stars above — she can’t let it control the bright, unwavering pillar of love and support sitting before her.

She can’t. She  _ won’t.  _ Booker may not be strong enough to face it, but she is, like she has been in all things. She has fought countless battles, uncountable wars, has seen so much blood and pain and loss she should have broken long ago. If that hadn’t crushed her, then the love these two men share couldn’t ever annihilate her — it blanketed her, comforted her.

She’s only sorry she didn’t allow it to sooner.

Something of her inner conflict must show on her face, because after a few moments of stone-still hesitation, the two men before her melt into each other. Their shoulders press together, their hands seek each other, and for the first time since they hopped on that train to escape Sudan just two short days ago, she watches with joy and relief as their heads turn and their lips meet. It’s a short kiss, meant to comfort and reassure, but never in all her years of seeing Nicky and Joe kiss has she seen them more in love than right now.

“ _ Grazie,” _ Nicky says quietly. His forehead is pressed to Joe’s, but Andy nods, accepting his forgiveness. 

“You’re welcome,” she says. She stands, sighing as her side burns. “Now help me get these pull-out beds unfolded so we can fucking sleep.”

Joe and Nicky huff their amusement. They stand, and together help Andy toss couch cushions and yank the folding beds out on their squeaky hinges. Well, Andy does the tossing and the two of them do the yanking, but by the end of it they’re smiling and feeling more like themselves in a long while.

Nile finishes her shower shortly after, and Nicky and Joe usher Andy in after her. Andy is grateful, even as she can’t quite pull her gaze from the tacky hair at the back of Nicky’s skull or the bloody holes in Joe’s shirt. She makes it quick even as the wound in her side aches, scrubbing blood and grime from her skin, pulling on soft sleeping pants and a shirt she’s sure is Nicky’s before she can properly dry off. The two of them trade places with her, using up the remaining hot water in only ten minutes, coming out smelling clean and looking more like the young men they are and not battle-hardened swordsmen from a thousand years ago.

Booker had come from one of the back rooms while they showered, startling them both with his presence at the kitchen island. He dips his chin in apology, keeping his eyes on the marble countertop, allowing them to pass him by into the living room. Andy watches them closely — Nicky’s fingers tighten around Joe’s, a silent request to be quiet — and breathes a sigh of relief when neither of them try to speak. Joe looks worse for it as he settles in on one side of the first pull-out, so Andy reaches over and squeezes his shoulder in gratitude. 

“I’ll share with Nile,” she says quietly. Nile climbs into the second pull-out, the one perpendicular to the kitchen. Andy had asked her to before Joe and Nicky emerged from the bathroom, giving the two men no choice but to take the pull-out that didn’t have a view of Booker. When they lay down, all they’ll see is the living room, and not the rest of the apartment. Andy, however, will, and Joe seems to recognize the kindness.

“Thank you,” he says. She leans forward and kisses his cheek, then settles behind Nile in their pull-out, shifting so she’s partially on her side so she can see Booker’s silhouette clearly as he sits in near-darkness.

Nicky climbs into bed first, as he always does, hiding away the handgun he carries with him under a pillow within reach. Andy has watched this ritual before, from the time it was daggers and machetes to flintlock pistols and carbine rifles. Nicky has always been the lighter sleeper, and it has always amused her the things he hides in his marriage bed to protect himself and his other half.

She doesn’t laugh now, however. The danger he feels is from his brother, his family, and she can’t begrudge him that. She watches as Joe curls behind him, gathering him up in his embrace, pulling their bodies together until their breathing falls in tandem. 

“Goodnight Andy, Nile,” Nicky says quietly. A small plea in the dark, warming Andy to the core. Even in the face of everything, this small platitude he still extends. 

“Goodnight guys,” Nile says through a yawn. Andy can hear the smile in her voice. This is normalcy for her, too, even though this family is different from the one she’s familiar with. “See you all in the morning.”

“Goodnight,” Joe mumbles, and then, quieter, “ _ Dormi bene, cuore mio. _ _ ” _

_ “ _ _ Ti amo. Dormi bene, tesoro, _ _ ”  _ Nicky responds. 

“Goodnight,” Andy says. “Sleep well.”

No one acknowledges Booker. Andy wouldn’t want to even if she felt the need to — they know that even as he sits there protecting them that things are too raw, too real. She hears Joe mutter something low in Arabic followed by a soft kiss, and in the face of the encroaching darkness Andy doesn’t envy him one bit.

To sleep in the same room as a betrayer was beyond difficult. She feels in her bones the ache of that betrayal even as her family falls asleep while she stays awake, like a bone setting wrong after a break. This is somehow worse than all they’ve faced, but then, there is no  _ somehow _ with things like this. 

She knows what’s been done and why. She knows this will take time to heal. She knows a price must be paid — maybe not in blood, but a price, anyway.

Nile seems to fall asleep quickly, like Joe, leaving the room in a serene, if charged, silence. Booker doesn’t make any noise save for the soft whisper of pages turning as he reads, shadowed though he is in the dark. The only light to see by is the stove lamp, and even that is yellow and dull. It’s enough to see him move as he breathes — enough to see if he will leave or try something during the night — but she knows he won’t. She watches anyway, for herself and Nile and for the two tortured men sleeping beside her. She watches so that, as the minutes turn to hours, Nicky can finally fall into a deep sleep he hasn’t had since God knows when.

She can count on one hand the nights she’s seen Nicky really sleep. They are too much like each other, herself and her Nicolò, too aware and too restless to allow themselves this respite. She knows he sleeps deeply when the time allows — knows it’s intrinsically tied to Joe’s comfort and proximity — but even going back to that first night they all slept together as a group, herself and Quynh in one bedroll and Nicky and Joe in the other, she can remember only a few instances where he finally  _ rested. _

This is one of those few instances. Her eyes adjust to the dark and she can see him relax, watch him melt into Joe’s arms wrapped around him. They have slept like this as long as she can remember. Sometimes the position changes — sometimes Joe is on his back with Nicky cradled against his chest, sometimes Nicky is on his stomach with Joe’s face pressed between Nicky’s shoulder blades — but this, the two of them together, has never changed. They are inseparable even in the rare instances when they fight. Joe sleeps deeply, heavily, and Nicky follows him after allowing himself the reassurance that their immediate vicinity is safe.

She watches as that moment finally happens. He breathes deep, inhale, exhale, and then he’s gone. His fingers thread through Joe’s, curled against his chest, and even with a snake at their backs, he allows himself respite.

The night passes without incident. Nile is a heavy sleeper, second only to Joe, but as the morning begins to turn wet and grey, it becomes apparent that everyone is in need of rest. Nicky doesn’t wake when his watch beeps his seven o’clock alarm, so Booker rises to silence it. As Nile sleeps on, Andy gets up and dresses, allowing Booker to relinquish his place at the kitchen counter. He smiles at her, guilty and apologetic, then retreats to the back room, leaving the bedroom door open before collapsing onto the bare mattress. Andy doesn’t move to follow or comfort him. This is something he must discover on his own: forgiveness.

The morning lightens, but not by much, and after a few hours of quiet rest, Nicky rises. His hair is flattened on one side and his shirt is rumpled from where Joe had been squeezing him, making him appear boyish. He smiles sleepily at Andy before disappearing into the bathroom, carrying a set of clean clothes. He comes out wearing a soft grey tee shirt and dark jeans, his sleepwear folded under his arm. He packs them back into the duffel Nile emptied the night before, then sits on the edge of the pull-out he shared with Joe, a meaningful look tossed Andy’s way.

Andy nods. “Soon,” she says. “Copley hasn’t said anything, but soon.”

They need to move. They’re still close to London, too close to the eyes and ears of someone that could ambush them. Merrick isn’t twenty-four hours dead and still she feels his eyes watching her from beyond the grave.

Nicky leans over Joe, his lips brushing his high cheekbone. “ _ Ya hayati _ _ ,”  _ he murmurs. He kisses Joe’s temple as one hand curls over his shoulder. “ _ Il mio amore, il mio cuore, il mio tutto. Ti alzi per favore _ _?” _

Joe grumbles, shifting. Andy has to suppress a laugh as he tightens his arms around a body that isn’t there anymore. 

“Time is it?” Joe says, voice thick with sleep. Nicky picks up his watch from the side table and glances at it before pocketing it. 

“Nine,” he says. “Get up,  _ amore _ , and I’ll buy coffee.”

The promise of caffeine is enough to rouse Joe. Nile too, apparently, if her shifting and stretching in bed is any indication.

“Someone say coffee?” she asks. She’s up in an instant when she notices Nicky is dressed, military training kicking in. 

Nicky smiles at her. “Maybe, if you and Joe get dressed.”

“ _ Sei così cattivo con me _ _ ,”  _ Joe whines. 

Nicky kisses his hair as Joe rises. “Only you,  _ tesoro.  _ Now please. Get dressed.”

The urgency to move isn’t lost on any of them, teasing aside. Andy knows this is the only small comfort they will get for a while — these small, intimate moments in the mornings, with Booker out of mind and the wounds on their bodies invisible. But the heartache is still there, with the way they cling to each other, hold each other, so when it comes time for her, Andy accepts the hugs and soft touches. Nile grips her tightly, in gratitude and apology, and that more than anything is enough to keep her going.

——

Leaving Booker at the Thames is hard. It’s harder to book a flight, because the more they do, the more money they spend, it just makes that promise more real. One hundred years, she’d said. Nicky had acquiesced with quiet resignation. Joe hadn’t spoken, but the heat in his eyes, the heartbreak and sorrow, had said enough.

“The States?” Nile says in surprise. She’s looking down at the paper ticket in her hand, reading it again and again. Andy smiles at the sad, hopeful look in her eyes. “We’re going to America?”

“There’s a farm there,” Joe says. He’s walking hand in hand with Nicky beside them, looking for all the world like a happy tourist. Nicky is talking to Copley on a burner they bought in the airport mall. “We bought it a while back, when we needed a quiet place to settle back on. It’s in the middle of nowhere, perfect for lying low.”

Nile snorts. “What? No exotic country this time? Egypt, Japan, Switzerland? Somewhere more interesting than  _ home?” _

Andy can’t stop herself from rolling her eyes. “We all speak the language, and no one will bat an eye at teaching you to shoot.”

“Besides, we don’t have a place in Japan,” Joe says lightly.

“Boring,” Nile says. “Stuck with the lot of you forever, and you’re boring.”

“You get to shoot big guns,” Andy tries.

Nile’s expression softens. “Alright. Maybe not so boring.”

Nicky snaps the phone shut, drawing their attention to him. Andy raises an expectant brow, which he shrugs at. 

“Copley has sent a few people to clean the place,” Nicky says. His expression is amused, though he isn’t smiling. “Who knew an ex-CIA security head had a maid service on speed dial.”

“I think that’s the point, Nicolò,” Joe mutters good naturedly. 

“Coulda done with that this morning,” Nile says, her nose wrinkling. “That safehouse was  _ rank.” _

Joe and Nicky mumble their agreements. It hadn’t been so much a safehouse and more a studio apartment with one bed and nothing else. The moment they’d stepped through the door, it became apparent no one had used it in at least a year, with a thick layer of dust covering everything and a dead rat in the sink, its neck snapped under the jaws of a wooden trap. Joe and Nicky had made their bed on the floor, leaving the bed for Andy and Nile, but Andy isn’t sure it was out of kindness.

Her back still hurts and Nile had nearly choked her with how tightly she’d cuddled her, but it was the first night since Booker’s betrayal that Andy had slept. She knows Joe and Nicky didn’t sleep much — that came with sleeping on the floor — but they’re together, at least, and so far no one has flushed them out of cover.

The absence beside her doesn’t go unnoticed. She doesn’t acknowledge it, even as it aches inside her much worse than the wound in her side. Joe and Nicky are deftly ignoring it, nursing their own pain, so Andy follows their lead. They have Nile to think about, after all.

Their flight to America is a long one, and Copley was kind enough to purchase tickets in first class. Nile and Andy take their seats beside each other, with Joe and Nicky in front of them. Joe turns in his seat and chats with Nile for most of the hour they spend during pre-flight boarding, his voice light and calming. He’s always been better at connecting, at building friendships and camaraderie. Nicky sits beside him, their fingers laced together, a book propped on his knee that Andy knows he isn’t reading.

When the plane begins pushback, Joe winks at Nile and turns back around in his seat. He and Nicky settle together, so Andy does as well — she isn’t even offended when Nile rests her head on her shoulder. Nile is young, and tired, and seeking comfort she can’t find through her family lost to her now. Andy doesn’t have it in her to deny this, no matter how small.

They sleep most of the flight. They have a connection in New York, which Nicky is barely awake for, and another in Houston. The final leg to California is a short three hour flight, which they spend blearily awake, listening to the high-pitched thrum of the engines behind them and the whistle of wind as the plane slips through it. 

It’s dark when they land in Sacramento. Nicky wanders off to find the keys for the car Copley left them, while Joe and Nile go fetch their luggage. Andy buys another burner to confirm their firearms are on a charter flight behind them, which Copley says will arrive sometime during the night. He confirms that the farm is safe, empty, and without any monitoring devices. She assures him that she will be double checking anyway, and while he doesn’t seem offended, she can hear the slight thrill of fear in his voice should she find anything unwanted. 

She pockets the phone with a hum when Nicky comes back to her with keys in his hand. He hands them to her with a smile.

“It’ll be a nice break,” he says. They step onto the escalator leading down to baggage claim, the great glass ceiling above them giving them a view of the stars. A plane flies overhead, too far away to hear. 

“The farm?” Andy asks. She smirks. “We aren’t getting animals this time.”

Nicky shakes his head, a wry look crossing his face. “No. There’s too much work for that. I meant being together. No jobs.”

Andy sighs. She doesn’t miss the glance he throws at her side. 

“It’ll be nice,” she concedes. She meets his wry look with one of her own. “But we still have some training to do.”

Nicky’s expression softens when they get to the bottom of the escalator. Joe and Nile are waiting for them a couple feet away, bags piled on their shoulders, bickering about Nile’s admittedly superior music choices.

Her family. Her home. Nicky’s too, and when she looks up at him, she sees him start to really heal from the last couple days.

“We’ll do right by her, Andy,” Nicky says quietly. He kisses her cheek then steps away, taking bags from Joe before accepting the kiss his other half has waiting for him. Nile is embraced by them both, scooped up under their combined might, and Andy hasn’t felt this light in a long, long time.

——

The farm, as Joe so humbly put it, is not what Nile expected.

Texas was the furthest west she’d ever been, and even that was a short visit to extended family she never saw again. Farms there were sprawling ranches, complete with paddocks and pastures and animals roaming about. Old tractors sat in fields, history used as lawn decoration, and more often than not, the houses sitting on these huge plots of land were worth more than the dirt underneath it.

She imagined, in some form or another, something out of a Hallmark movie. The horse ranch in  _ Secretariat _ , maybe. Something timeless and beautiful, locked away in a pocket of the world where nothing but their own hands could shape its future.

This, however, is not that.

Hidden away between hills and buttes, down a winding paved road that turns to gravel and then dirt at some point, emerges a flat ranch-style building. It’s hard to see much in the dark as they pull up the gravel driveway, but she can see a wraparound porch, and beyond the house, a tall barn lurking in the dark. 

“Home sweet home,” Joe says. “For the next couple months, anyway.”

“”Home sweet home” better have some dinner,” Nile says. They’ve been driving for nearly two hours now, north from Sacramento into the heart of northern California. She didn’t eat on the plane, and Nicky didn’t stop at any drive-thrus on the way here. She suspects it was drowsiness that kept him from stopping, so she keeps the annoyance out of her tone.

Andy snorts beside her. “I’ll go pick something up. There’s a town nearby with a twenty-four hour grocery store.”

“I’ll come with,” Nicky says. Andy tutts at him.

“No,” she says. “You and Joe stay. Sweep the place — you know what to do.”

Nicky and Joe nod. The car comes to a stop, and while the boys trot up the steps of the wooden porch, Nile helps Andy grab the bags out of the trunk. Andy gives her a knowing look, a bemused smile on her face.

Nile can’t help but return it. “We’re leaving them alone, I take it?”

“Just for twenty minutes,” Andy answers. “They haven’t been alone for a week. I think they need it.”

“Well, at least they can’t get up to much. I really don’t want to see that.”

Andy laughs. It’s the first time Nile has heard it, and it warms her right through. 

“Don’t underestimate Joe,” she says, her smile all teeth. Nile is grateful for how dark it is outside as she feels heat climb her neck.

Nile follows Andy into the house and is greeted by warm hardwood floors and a wide, open floor plan completely unlike what she was expecting of such an old place. The living area flows seamlessly into a combined kitchen and dining area, and at the back of the house, the oak paneling transforms into glass windows, revealing the dark backyard. 

It looks… surprisingly lived in. Nicky was right — the place smells clean, courtesy of Copley — though it’s obvious he was instructed to leave everything in its place. Framed pictures cluster the walls, a flat screen sits across from the couch, and the kitchen isn’t so outdated that it feels original. This is obviously a place the group escapes to frequently. 

Nile sets her bags down, stepping close to a framed picture hanging on the wall next to the television. It’s in black and white, with two well-dressed men standing in front of a ranch-style house that looks eerily familiar. The two men look eerily familiar as well, especially their wide, easy smiles and the way they embrace each other. 

“Is this  _ you two?” _ Nile says. She can’t keep the laugh out of her voice even if she’d tried. When she turns, Joe is smiling just like one of the men in the picture.

“Nicky and I bought this place back in 1899,” he says proudly. He puffs out his chest a bit — Nicky rolls his eyes as he finishes his loop of the house, but his smile is fond.

“How much did it cost you?” Nile asks. And then, belatedly, “this place is over a hundred years old?”

Nicky waves a hand. “ _ Bought  _ is a strong word. We… may or may not have acquired it through more illicit means.”

“We stopped a train robbery,” Andy deadpans. It startles a laugh out of Nile, though Joe and Nicky don’t seem embarrassed in the slightest. Andy continues even as she starts unzipping their luggage to put away. “The guy that owned the shipping company was grateful, and gave the deed to Nicky.”

“Couldn’t give it to the Muslim, you see,” Joe says. He hooks an arm around Nile’s shoulders, giving her a wink. “But his  _ husband _ —“

“He didn’t know,” Nicky cuts in.

“It’s the principle of the thing!”

“You two have  _ never _ been subtle,” Andy says. 

“As if I could!” Joe turns, releasing Nile. “ _Ya eazizaa! Ya hayati_ _!_ How can I possibly contain myself around divine beauty walking our humble earth?”

He wraps his arms around Nicky’s waist, much like he is in the picture, bringing his other half close to him. Nicky sighs, embracing Joe around the shoulders, accepting the sloppy kiss Joe presses to his cheek even as he tries to look long-suffering.

Nile covers her mouth with a hand to hide her smile. She’s known these men for hardly a week and she can already feel how at home they make her feel. Her mother and father had been the same way until he died, so in love and devoted, finding new ways to show their feelings every day. They may not have had centuries to do so, but she feels like she sees her parents in Nicky and Joe before her, two bright souls given the gift of love for all of time.

She doesn’t realize she’s crying until Joe’s surprisingly familiar embrace wraps around her, bringing her against his chest. He’s warm, and she hides her tears in the soft cotton of his shirt for a long, long time — she doesn’t know how long they stand there even as her throat begins to hurt from crying and her fingers begin to ache with how tightly she clings to him. 

“It’ll be okay,” she hears him say. His voice is low and comforting, vibrating right through her. His heartbeat is a steady rhythm against her cheek, and for a brief moment, she lets herself pretend it’s her mother’s even as it brings fresh tears stinging at the corners of her eyes.

After some time — she doesn’t know how long — another body closes around her, pressing her close to Joe’s chest. She realizes it’s Nicky, his chin resting on top of her head. He’s warm, too, and his touch is kind as he sweeps her braids from her shoulders so they don’t tug against her scalp.

“We can never replace what you had,” he says quietly. “You will always be tied to your family. But we are here for you, in whatever capacity you need.”

“You aren’t alone,” Joe reassures. “Never alone, Nile.”

She can’t fight back the sob from jumping up her throat. Being so far from home — from her mom, her brother, the familiarity of their presence and the knowledge that she would always have them — finally hits her. She isn’t able to see them anymore. She can’t sit at the dinner table and say grace with them anymore, can’t spend birthdays and holidays with them, can’t teach her brother how to drive a stick or shoot a gun; can’t sit on the floor while her mother braids her hair or spend hours every weekend taking her to the mall to buy her expensive shoes just to see her smile.

They’re lost to her now, like sand between her fingers. Their hourglass will eventually run dry while hers — 

Joe and Nicky don’t let her go for a while. She wouldn’t want them to, even as she soaks Joe’s shirt with snot and tears. Nicky sings to her, in the low, comforting lilt of a language she doesn’t recognize, but she understands the tune as one of a lullaby. Eventually, they guide her to the couch, helping her sit while she still clings to Joe. He seems reluctant to let her go, so while she feels awful for suddenly breaking down, she accepts the comfort as it’s given, even as she longs to feel her mother’s arms around her instead. 

A door clicking closed startles her awake some indeterminate time later. She jerks up, dislodging a warm arm from around her waist, blinking against the grey morning light filtering in from the windows behind her. Nicky is standing at the slider guiltily, a grimace on his face. 

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he says. 

Nile shakes her head. “No, it’s okay.” She looks down and finds Joe blinking up at her, roused from sleep, his shirt rumpled and still slightly damp.

“I’m sorry,” Nile mumbles. Her throat is thick with sleep, her mouth feeling like it’d been stuffed with cotton. Joe flaps a hand at her, though it’s clear he hadn’t been expecting to be woken up so suddenly.

“You needed it,” he says. He sits up — she’d fallen asleep on his chest, the both of them having reclined back on the couch. “Although, I didn’t anticipate you being a big cuddler.”

Nile accepts the jab as it is. He’s smiling, trying to make her feel better, so she punches his arm as he moves to stand. 

“Thanks,” she says quietly, and then looks at Nicky apologetically. It’s clear he spent the rest of the night on his own — he’s freshly showered and in clean, comfortable clothes, a coffee mug in his hand. His shirt is spotted with rain from the light morning drizzle pattering against the window panes. 

“I didn’t mean to take Joe from you,” she says lamely.

Nicky and Joe meet in a chaste kiss. Nicky pulls away with a smile, first waving Joe off in the direction of what must be the bathroom, and then giving Nile a tight hug around her shoulders as he sits beside her.

“You needed it,” he says, in a perfect echo of Joe earlier. “The world is brand new, now. If you need help, just ask.”

Nile nods. She can feel fresh tears burning behind her eyelids, so she scrubs them away with the back of her sleeve. Nicky kisses her hair — the gesture, while still new, doesn’t feel odd or overly familiar — and then rises, wiggling his coffee mug in his hand.

“Breakfast?”

Nile sighs, smiling. “Yes, please.”

Nicky points her to her bag at the end of the couch before retreating into the kitchen — though it’s all one room, so he doesn’t go far. Joe emerges from the first door in the tiny hallway leading to the left side of the house, leaving it open behind him. He urges her inside, plucking some towels from a hallway linen closet before handing them to her.

She takes them and closes the door behind her, clicking on the light. The bathroom is bigger than she anticipated, with a bath and shower combo at the end. The shower curtain is a neutral grey, as is much of the room, though there are signs of everyone’s personalities even here. Andy’s toiletry bag is sitting on the counter, as is Joe and Nicky’s shaving kit, some of its contents already spilling out onto a hand towel underneath it. A laundry basket sits across from the sink, already halfway full with damp towels. The shower drips a steady rhythm, and the sheer normalcy of standing in a bathroom shared by three other people calms her more than Frank Ocean ever could.

By the time she finishes her shower — only slightly embarrassed by the amount of brand new hair care products someone had bought her some time during the night — the smell of breakfast has wafted under the bathroom door, making her stomach growl. Nile tosses her clothes and towel into the hamper and follows the smell out into the kitchen where Nicky is flipping pancakes and Joe is cutting fresh strawberries into thin slices.

“Glad you’re awake,” Andy says as Nile slides onto a stool at the kitchen island next to her. Nile hadn’t seen her earlier, not since the night before, though she looks well-rested. Nile accepts the punch to the shoulder Andy gives her with a smile.

“Slept better than the last couple days,” Nile admits. She glances at Joe, who winks at her. 

“That’s all that matters,” he says. “No bad dreams?”

She knows what he’s really asking. Under Andy’s careful stare, Nile shakes her head, grateful she can answer the question truthfully. 

Andy’s expression softens. “Good,” she says. “I’m sorry you have to endure that, Nile.”

Nile nods. She still doesn’t understand how heavy these dreams can be, but judging by Booker’s apparent inability to cope with them, she isn’t looking forward to enduring them. Nicky and Joe are looking at her meaningfully, however, and she gets the feeling there may be some plot brewing on how to solve that particular problem.

But it’s a problem for another day. Nicky slides a plate in front of her, piled high with pancakes and strawberries and syrup. Joe sets a mug of coffee next to it, then gives Andy her share, before he and Nicky both sit across from them with their own plates.

“Thank you,” Nile says. Nicky smiles, small and warm.

“Always,” he says. “Now eat. There’s a long day ahead of us.”

Nile glances at the rain hitting the windows with disdain. She’s never been to California, but she knows one thing about California winters and one thing only: they’re wet. She isn’t particularly interested in reenacting her basic training in front of people she’s going to be spending eternity with, but before that awful mental image can run away from her, Joe shakes his head with an amused grin.

“Nothing like that,” he says. He gestures between himself and Nicky. “Language lessons — we can’t escape to the far corners of the Earth with a fourth of us unable to fend for herself, can we?”

Nile tries not to let her fear of her American tongue get the best of her. “What, no hand-to-hand combat? No gun safety training? No pacer test?”

Andy barely suppresses a snort. “The world’s hardly that straight-forward.”

“After what we just did?” Nile scoffs and takes a bite of her pancakes. They taste good — like home. She gives Nicky a meaningful smile that he returns. “It’s hard to believe anything you people do is less than crazy”.

Joe makes an  _ ehh _ sound. “It’s a lot of running, mostly.”

“And waiting,” Nicky says.

“A lot of waiting.”

“You don’t get to be this old without waiting,” Andy says.

“All right,” Nile snaps with a laugh. “Don’t even start. I saw Copley’s wall of pictures just like the rest of you. I know what you guys do. There isn’t a patient bone in any of your bodies.”

Joe’s smile is beatific. “Then I guess you pass the first test.”

Nile rolls her eyes. “It doesn’t take a genius to pay attention. I was a Marine, you know.”

Joe holds up his hands. Nicky kicks him, and when Joe turns his shocked expression towards him, Nicky continues to peacefully eat his breakfast.

“Children,” Andy sighs. “Nine hundred years old and you both still act like children.”

“I did nothing,” Nicky says innocently. He dodges Joe’s arm as the other man swipes for him, getting up and putting his plate in the dishwasher in the same movement.

Andy turns a raised brow to Nile. “You sure you’re alright with this?”

Nile realizes she’s been smiling the whole time. Her cheeks hurt with it, but she wouldn’t trade anything for the warm, comforting feeling encompassing her. Nicky and Joe exchange a meaningful look, and she knows right then she made the right choice.

“Yeah,” she says. “I think I’m alright.”

  
  


——

Joe wasn’t kidding. After breakfast and morning showers, he pulls out two sketchbooks from his duffel and sits down with her on the couch, handing her one with a pencil folded into the pages.

“Italian,” he says without preamble, “is where we’ll start.”

Nile opens the sketchbook and flips through it. It’s mostly full of landscapes, with studies of birds and still-lifes mixed in. She recognizes Nicky on a few pages too, portraits and rendered sketches of his hands. She stops on the page the pencil had bookmarked, smiling at the drawing of Nicky sitting perched at a windowsill, his rifle in his hands, peering into the scope while his finger hovers over the trigger.

“You’re really good,” she says. Joe hums, writing something down in his own sketchbook. She kicks his foot, raising a brow when she gets his attention. “I mean it, man.”

Joe winks. “I’ve had a lot of practice. And a beautiful muse.”

Nile has to stop herself from probing further. She wonders if Joe paints, if he’s somewhere in museums or private collections. She wonders if, out there in the world of so much history on brazen display, a painting of Nicky sits on a wall somewhere, surrounded by tourists and clueless historians. She wonders if anything Joe has done has reached her and she just hasn’t figured it out yet.

Joe seems to read her mind, and with a nudge of his shoulder against hers, catches her eye. “My Nicolò isn’t for the rest of the world to see. Even in the tamest of my portraits of him, he is mine, and mine only.” 

“I thought he was the kindest man you knew,” Nile teases.

“His kindness is his to give. But Nicolò —  _ il mio amante, la mia vita, la mia anima eterna _ _ —  _ I cannot let just anyone’s eyes fall upon him.”

Nile shakes the sketchbook in her hands. Joe’s laugh is loud, his dark eyes twinkling.

“My dear Nile, what you hold in your hands is but a drop in the ocean of my attempts to capture him. You won’t find anything dirty in there.”

“What a disappointment,” she deadpans.

He shakes his head. He flips the sketchbook in his lap around so she can see what he’s written — a list of words in a column, like what she used to do for first grade homework. At her raised brow, his smile turns boyish.

“Pronouns first,” he says. “If I’m going to be teaching someone from the twenty-first century, I’m going to do this right.”

She snorts. His attention to details never seems to cease, even for little things like this. She doesn’t even know where he’s learned it from, but then again, being in a monogamous homosexual relationship with one’s soulmate for nearly a thousand years is bound to give one some instinctual insight for these things.

Joe, among other things, is a great teacher. His personality melds nicely against hers, and while she feels like her brain may explode with how much twisting she has to do to make it understand a language like Italian, he makes it easy. Italian is a gendered language, so starting from her pronouns is a perfect spot for him to launch into the ways words branch off depending on who or what is being spoken about. 

He teaches her endearments, too, because he’s a sap and she can’t stop herself from asking. _Piccola_ is cute, but Nile doesn’t like it too much, so he sticks to her name or _sorellina._ Andy isn’t much at all besides Andy or boss _,_ though she discovers Andy isn’t much for nicknames, even moreso in a language reserved mostly for Joe and Nicky. Nicky, however, is many things, so many Joe can’t say them all, and by the time he starts to get misty-eyed, Nile steers him back to their lessons.

They spend much of their afternoon like that. Nicky and Andy go to town for some proper grocery shopping, picking up essentials as well as some requests from Joe and Nile. When they put everything away, the two of them go out into the rain to the barn, supposedly to check things over and to make any needed repairs. At Nile’s raised brow, Joe explains that there’s another car in the barn, along with a stash of supplies should they need to book it and lie low.

They break for lunch, sharing a quiet meal of sandwiches. Nicky finishes first — he’s quick to finish eating, Nile finds, though she has to fight off her own instinct to eat fast after so much time in the military — and after putting his dishes in the sink, he begins preparing dinner. He puts a large pot on the stove and begins chopping vegetables, the sound of the knife hitting the cutting board a familiar rhythm that sets Nile at ease.

After that, Joe leads her to a room at the end of the short hall. It’s a small bedroom, with a double mattress against the far wall in the center and a desk beside it. There are pictures on the wall in here too, but most of them are landscapes, and one half of the bed has clearly already been claimed with Andy’s bag sitting on the closest side.

“Lesson number two,” Joe says. He takes Nile’s bag from her and sets it on the other side of the bed, giving her a look. “Sleeping arrangements.”

“I’ve slept in combat zones,” Nile says.

“With set guard rotations and about fifty people between you and danger,” Joe agrees. His tone isn’t condescending, but Nile feels herself bristle anyway. She isn’t a  _ child.  _

Joe raises his hands in surrender. “It’s just the four of us,” he says. It sounds more like an apology, but it’s the words more than his tone that calms her. He’s right. “I know you’ve got some of this down, but take an old man’s word for it, yeah?”

Nile nods. “Yeah, alright. So will it always be me and Andy?”

“Usually,” Joe says. He steps back so she can start unpacking her bag, pointing to a closet across from the bed wordlessly. “Sometimes two of us split off on smaller jobs, leaving the other two to man the safehouse. We don’t really leave anyone alone unless it’s a break.”

“You guys take breaks?” 

Joe shrugs his shoulders. “We were taking one. For a year. Until… until recently.”

Nile bites her tongue. She has to remind herself he’s barely a week out from being tortured. He probably wants to spend all day curled up in bed, and yet here he is, kindly and selflessly showing her the ropes.

She wraps an arm around his middle, squeezing him close. “Thanks, man,” she says quietly.

He returns the hug easily. “You’re welcome. We’re here for you, no matter what.”

She swallows back tears and nods. “Okay.”

“And Nicky and I —“ He laughs, short and light. “We aren’t the horndogs Andy says we are. If you need someone to talk to — because of the nightmares or whatever else — our door is open.”

Nile punches him in the ribs lightly. “Put a sock on the door, alright? I’ll get the hint.”

Joe smiles. “You got it.”

Joe leaves her to it after showing her his and Nicky’s room. It’s the only other door in the house, the room next to the bathroom. It’s smaller, much smaller than hers and Andy’s room, which he rebuffs with a quirked brow at her confused expression.

“Nicky and I have lived together for a long time,” he says. “We don’t need the space. You do.”

Nile takes the gift graciously. She has to remember how old these people are. They’ve probably spent a good portion of their lives practically on top of each other, so this, the promise of space and safety, is a luxury they rarely get to savor.

She returns to her shared room with Andy and puts her things away like Joe wanted her to. Andy has taken half the closet, leaving her things on one side in a clear invitation to take the other, so she does. There’s a weapons locker hidden in the back of the closet, its door left open, so Nile makes sure not to block it as she finds space for the luggage while still leaving everything within easy reach.

They may have to run, afterall. Though judging by how lived-in this place is, she imagines this is one of the few places the group can readily retreat to to disappear.

When she’s done, she joins the others in the main room. Andy is curled up in the corner of the couch, a book in her lap, while Nicky and Joe are conversing quietly in the kitchen. Nile sits on the couch with Andy, leaving ample space between them, and reaches for the remote sitting on the miniscule side table next to her.

“You guys don’t have Netflix I take it?” she says. “Being immortal shadows of the night, and all that.”

Andy snorts. Joe outright laughs, abandoning his spot ogling Nicky as he cooks to join them on the couch. 

“Andy wouldn’t know what Netflix is if it slapped her in the face,” Joe says. Andy shoots him an offended glare. He shrugs, his grin all teeth; then he looks at Nile, his smile turning a little sadder. “But no. No Netflix, no social media. You know the rules.”

Nile nods, trying not to let her disappointment show. “Yeah, I get it.”

“We have cable,” Nicky chimes in. He hasn’t turned around from where he’s cooking, his head bent in concentration. 

Joe raises a brow at Nile. “Cable good enough?”

Nile rolls her eyes. “I grew up with dial-up. I think cable is just fine.”

Joe laughs. When Nile glances at Andy, she’s smiling, hiding it behind her book. 

She finds a movie on one of the basic cable channels, one she hasn’t seen and isn’t too interested in but it’s something to do. Joe settles beside her, his arm thrown out behind her on the back of the couch. He seems to be the type to pick apart movies after the fact, so Nile sets to absorbing as much as possible just to play devil’s advocate later.

Meanwhile, Nicky cooks. He’s surprisingly quiet as he does, careful not to set pots down too hard or run the sink for too long. The house starts to smell like garlic and creamy pasta, and when she peeks over Joe’s shoulder, she spots Nicky grating fresh parmesan into a bowl.

It makes her mouth water. Thankfully, not even a half hour into the movie, Nicky calls them for dinner. They leave the movie on as background noise, coming together around the kitchen island as Nicky plates alfredo onto plates for all four of them.

“I figured you’d want something comforting,” Nicky says quietly. 

“Nothing more comforting than Italian-American food,” Joe sighs. “ _ Grazie, ya amar. _ _ ” _

Nicky dips his chin, hiding a shy smile. “Of course.”

Nile looks down at her plate. It’s not a normal meal for her family, not by any means, but the smell of cheese and garlic and freshly grilled chicken brings her back to a time where nothing but sharing a meal with those she loved mattered. It occurs to her, then, the extent to which these people have gone to make sure she’s looked after and cared for, even in these small things like a home cooked meal and a group of people to watch television with.

She remembers Booker, and the way he had come to grips with what he’d done. In the face of immortality he had lost himself — his family, his life, his home. Over time, he’d lost his faith, and as a result of that, his capacity to care.

She looks at Nicky. He’s watching her, his expression calmly impassive. She’s come to expect this of him — come to not be afraid of it — but behind his grey-green eyes she sees the fear.

His brother had hurt him. Had hurt the man he loves, and as a result, Nicky felt responsible. He hasn’t shied from Joe, not since that first night, but she sees in him the hesitation, the hurt.

Nile sets her fork down. She realizes no one else has started eating, frozen in time right there beside her. They’re watching her, waiting, hoping to see what she’s finally seeing for herself.

She covers Nicky’s hand with her own. “You don’t have to worry about me,” she says quietly. 

It’s Joe that speaks, even as Nicky’s long fingers close around her own in a tight squeeze. “We don’t want you to think we don’t care.”

“Joe,” Andy begins.

Joe shakes his head, and suddenly Nile sees the tears in his dark eyes. “Andy, don’t. We can’t — we can’t be the reason she resents us, too.”

“I don’t resent you,” Nile says. “I couldn’t dream of doing that.”

“She’s decided,” Andy says lowly. Hard, like she’s trying to make herself believe it, too.

Nile takes her hand as well. “I  _ have,” _ Nile presses. “I know what you guys think, but I won’t let what happened to Booker happen to me. I miss my family — I’ll always love them, Lord knows I will — but I can’t endanger them. They deserve peace, just like you do.”

She turns to pointedly look at Nicky and Joe. Nicky’s looking away, at Joe quietly wiping at his eyes beside him. Nicky’s hand is warm and broad around her own, surprisingly calloused but not rough against her skin. She squeezes his fingers again, making him look at her, making him  _ believe _ her.

Nicky is quiet as he looks at her. A long moment passes as he does, his eyes searching her face. She feels flayed alive but she holds still, letting him see the pain and regret there — letting him see that she won’t become his worst, greatest fear.

He eventually nods. He kisses her knuckles, then releases her, turning and wrapping his arms around Joe. She watches as a week’s worth of grief rolls off of them both, Joe especially, as his hands come up and twist his fingers into the back of Nicky’s shirt. 

“ _ Amore mio, per favore piangere _ _ ,”  _ Nicky murmurs. “ _ Sai quanto mi fa male sentirti piangere." _ __

His voice sounds wrecked, like he’s on the verge of crying himself — when Nile turns a guilty look at Andy, she shakes her head.  _ Not your fault,  _ Andy mouths.  _ It’s Booker’s.  _

“I’m so sorry, Nile, I —“ Joe tries. His face is pressed into Nicky’s neck, muffling his strained voice. She misses his laugh, suddenly. With an aching heart, she reaches over and squeezes his hand clinging to Nicky’s nape. He coughs, clearly hiding a sob. “I-I’m so sorry.”

“Oh,  _ habibi _ _ ,”  _ Nicky sighs into Joe’s hair. 

“Don’t be sorry,” she soothes. “Please, Joe. I don’t want you to be sorry.”

“What we did —“

“You didn’t do anything,” Andy says. “Joe — Nicky — please. You couldn’t have done anything different. What Booker did — that’s on him. Not on you, and certainly not on Nile.”

Her tone is broken, pleading. When Nile looks at her, she sees the heartbreak clearly in her red-rimmed eyes. It occurs to Nile that she hasn’t seen Andy cry until now. 

“Believe me, I’m not upset that you have each other,” Nile says softly. “I’m… I’m really happy to have you guys. You’ve been nothing but nice to me. You don’t have to go out of your way to endear yourselves to me just because of what Booker did.”

The kitchen falls quiet for a few long, tense moments. Joe is struggling to breathe, Nicky trying to help him through the worst of it even as his voice cracks with heartache. Nile and Andy come around them, wrapping them up in their arms, mirroring how Nicky and Joe had embraced Nile the night before.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” Nile murmurs. She presses her face between Nicky’s shoulders, letting herself feel how broad and strong he is. He is strong, but he’s also hurt. A millenia old and still his heart breaks over such small things. 

“I don’t want you to hurt,” Joe says, agonized. “Your family — you should be with them.”

“I didn’t choose this, just like you didn’t. Help me learn, Joe, and I promise to be stronger than my grief.”

Because she  _ does _ hurt. She misses her mom and brother like she never has before, but it doesn’t crush her, doesn’t destroy her. She sees them when she closes her eyes and for now, that’s enough. Her new family is here for her, and she’s determined to protect them.

She feels Nicky take in a rattled, deep breath underneath her cheek. “Let’s eat, my love,” he says quietly. “Nile is right. You can’t let this destroy you.”

“Please,” Andy says. “Don’t let it destroy you.”

Joe leans back, breaking the collective embrace they’d fallen into. His cheeks are ruddy and wet, his long eyelashes sticking to each other, but over Nicky’s shoulder he smiles at her. She’d gone a whole fifteen minutes without it and had already missed it.

“Alright,” he says. He scrubs at his face with his sleeve, wiping away the remains of his tears. “I’m sorry for ruining dinner.”

“You ruined nothing,” Andy says softly. She taps his plate in front of him before returning to her spot beside Nile. “Now, everyone — please eat.”

Nile gives Nicky a final squeeze before turning to her own food. Nicky looks not much better than Joe — he had clearly cried as well, though he seems better at hiding it — but he smiles, and thanks them all for joining him, and begins eating after Joe takes his first bite.

Dinner is quiet but not awkward. Nile has had her fair share of quiet dinners, usually after someone fought or had a bad day. Her mother never liked tension at the table, even when it was no one’s fault, so they usually sat down and aired out their thoughts before settling into their food, even if it was hours after the cooking had finished. 

It’s just another thing that strikes this little immortal family as  _ normal.  _ They fight, they have meltdowns, and then they cry and talk and eat after it’s all said and done. They are just as human as she had been. In the end, they have each other, and they’re hellbent on never letting go of this little piece of normal they have.

Since Nicky cooked, Joe and Nile take it upon themselves to clear away leftovers and do the dishes. Andy helps for a minute until her side really starts to bug her — well, until Nicky glares hard enough to send her slinking back to the couch. It makes Nile laugh, and at the sudden sound of her joy, the spell of silence hanging over them snaps like a too-tense rubber band.

“You’re going to have to teach me Arabic too,” Nile says. “It’s such a different language to Italian.”

“The sounds are certainly different,” Joe says. He shrugs, tossing his head towards Andy reclining on the couch. “Ask Andy — she was around when it formed, probably.”

Nile has to bite her tongue to keep herself from asking Andy’s age. The subject is still a sore spot, pun notwithstanding. 

“I’m not  _ that _ old,” Andy gripes, though her tone gives her away: she probably was. “Besides, it’s your mother tongue, Joe.”

“He prefers Italian,” Nicky says. Nile shoots him a look, one he returns placidly until she catches Joe’s lewd grin over his shoulder.

Nile groans, her face heating. “Guys, I swear to god —“

“A sock, a sock, I know,” Joe says, laughing. “I promise to cover Nicky’s mouth when he gets loud.”

“Not horndogs my fucking ass,” Nile mumbles. She tosses the towel she’d been using to dry dishes in Joe’s face, glaring at Nicky as she retreats to the couch to join Andy.

“Get used to it,” Andy says easily. Joe and Nicky begin play fighting behind them, Joe twisting the towel Nile had thrown at him and then snapping it at Nicky while his other half tries to snatch it away. Nicky is fast, and after the second attempt Joe makes at whipping him, Nicky grabs the towel away from him. 

It warms her right through, seeing them recover so easily. She knows it must be hard, but the ease with which they settle back into themselves eases her own heartache. They’ve lived a hundred lives before now, and still they’re willing to show such weakness in front of her. They love her, and care for her, like she was a part of themselves. There was no place for doubt in this little piece of home she’s found herself in.

They fall into comfortable silence after that. Joe and Nicky join them on the couch, turning their attention to whatever Nile can find on the limited selection of channels they have. She settles back onto a new movie when all three of her companions start embellishing overtop the history channel, all of them seemingly incapable of holding back. She supposes it’s one of the few ways one can cope with having eternity stretched out in front of them. 

But then the comments die down. It becomes obvious rather quickly that none of them have had a decent night’s sleep. Nile has a hard time staying awake, her eyelids becoming heavy not halfway through the movie. Joe and Nicky are curled up together, their legs entwined and hardly paying attention. Nile is pretty sure Joe is asleep, and Nicky is only awake through sheer force of will. When she gets up to turn the lights down, Nicky and Andy both don’t react, the both of them seemingly comatose where they lay stretched out. 

This, too, is a simple comfort of home. Watching something mindless, her family surrounding her, people who love and care for her not for what she can give them but for who she is. She completes them in a way she doesn’t fully understand that — a fifth of a whole soul finally awakened after going so long without. It doesn’t feel tense or awkward, not even as Nicky leans his head on her shoulder and Andy wraps her arm around her. These people mean protection, comfort,  _ belonging _ in a way that almost feels like her own mom and brother.

It’s no surprise, then, that sleep finds her easily. They all doze off like that, together, as rain patters against the house in a dull thrum, the television droning on and Joe’s soft snores a comforting rhythm she has already memorized.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am of the firm opinion that you need two or three chapters to get fully invested, so here is the second one. as usual, beta'd by my girlfriend. any remaining mistakes are my own.
> 
> edit: sorry, the end of the chapter somehow got cut off. it's been added. apologies!

The next week is filled with more training than Nile got in the whole six weeks she spent in basic.

She spends most of it learning to break down and reconstruct an assortment of weapons she’s quite frankly terrified these people have hidden at this unassuming farm house. Nicky is a quiet and patient teacher, and by the third day Nile can not only break down his large and cumbersome rifle in under fifteen seconds, she can do it with her eyes closed. Nevermind the dozens of other firearms she becomes intimately familiar with.

Joe, in between gun lessons with Nicky, shows her some basic swordplay. Nile is much more nervous about holding a blade — she’s been conditioned to fight at a distance, with the protection of a gun in her hand and the confidence of her team beside her — but now she’s part of a family that has lived (and literally died) by their swords. So when he gives her Nicky’s longsword, teaching her how to properly heft and wield it, her hesitation shows clearer than if she’d had a gun in her hand.

“It’s simply an extension of you,” Joe says. He’s blocking blows Nile throws his way, a repetitive sway and push he’s shown her so she builds up the muscles to hold a sword in her hand. She isn’t swinging hard, but even still the twang of metal hitting metal is loud in the afternoon air. “Think of it like your arm. You can bend and twist at the wrist, and you must protect that joint when you fight. Otherwise, you can throw a lot of force behind it. There isn’t much you can’t do with a blade.”

“Right,” Nile murmurs. With a shift of her forward foot — another thing Joe had shown her, how to simply stand and move with a sword — she begins her offense. Joe blocks her again and again, each meeting of their blades instilling in Nile more confidence. This isn’t about failure. This is about surviving, about _living_ — she has no other choice now.

With training comes downtime, too. With how quickly and efficiently these people move, Nile hadn’t been too convinced they knew how to relax. But then one day, after a particularly grueling bout of sparring between herself and Nicky, Andy taps her shoulder and leads her to the front portion of the living area. 

Andy is still too injured to engage in combat, even in training scenarios, but she still has enough strength in her for some yoga. She pushes aside the couch and encourages Nile to put on comfortable clothing, and then, while Nicky cooks and Joe sketches, Andy stands across from Nile while leading her through stretches.

“The moments after the fight are just as important as accomplishing the mission,” Andy says. Her hands are gentle on Nile’s wrists, her arms, the breadth of her ribcage — she’s become a softer person after regaining her mortality. Not softer as a consequence, but because even at her age, she can learn new things, too.

“Even when you can heal?” Nile asks.

“Especially because of it,” Andy says. “Just because you can heal doesn’t mean you don’t hurt.”

It’s so eerily similar to what Booker had said a couple weeks ago that it makes Nile falter. Andy keeps stretching, and after a moment, Nile mimics her. Booker had to have learned it somewhere. She’s seeing now just how intertwined these people’s lives have become.

The next week is live-fire training. Andy sits this one out as well, but she’s still there, leaning against the plastic fold-out table Joe had set up to lay down the weapons and ammunition Nicky will be showing her, her expression faintly amused. 

“We know you’ve got some training from the Marines,” Andy says. Nicky is assembling his rifle beside her — a humongous thing that, when it’s fully put together, nearly stands up to his shoulder. “But there may come times where you have to use something other than what you prefer. Nicky is our sniper. He’s the best shot we have.”

“You will be second to me in the sniper’s nest,” Nicky says. _Now that Booker’s gone_ goes unsaid.

Nile nods. When Nicky sidles up to her, she smiles. Nicky returns it, handing his rifle to her.

“Holy _shit_ this thing is heavy,” she huffs. “You lug this big thing around all the time?”

Joe waggles his eyebrows, his grin all teeth. Then he grunts as Andy elbows him, making Nile and Nicky snort.

“It isn’t so heavy when you have the strap over your head.” Nicky pulls it on for her, and then when she kneels next to the sandbags set up for her as a training wall, Nicky does as well. “Besides, you will use the bipod.”

He leans over her and flicks the bipod down. His movements are deliberately telegraphed, and Nile memorizes each one. 

“Now lean into it,” Nicky says. His hand on her shoulder guides her, and she settles against the rifle with the stock under her arm like he shows her. “If you have the stock against your shoulder like you normally would, it’ll hurt you. This is the best way to show you how to hold different guns than what you’re used to.”

Nile nods, breathing against the cold metal against her cheek. The rifle takes her weight like she means nothing, the bipod barely moving. When she looks into the scope, Nicky guides her hands to the correct positions against the grips, then moves her finger against the trigger.

“There is a wooden target against the fence there,” Nicky says quietly. She doesn’t have to move the rifle much to find it — it’s painted black and white, blending into the grey afternoon light. “When you shoot, breathe out. Five in, seven out, and squeeze.”

Nile does. The gun _cracks_ with a burst of noise louder than anything she’s heard from a gun and then the target explodes in a spray of wood and dirt, taking out a fence post beside it. Nicky huffs a laugh while Joe hoots and hollers.

“She’s a natural!” Joe shouts. When Nile turns her elated smile on him, he kneels beside her and kisses her cheek. “Oh, Nile, you’re doing so well!”

“It was a lucky shot,” she laughs.

“Are you kidding me?” Joe scoffs. “When I held that thing for the first time I nearly shot myself in the foot!”

“You did well,” Nicky says. He cups her shoulder, and she sinks back against the rifle. “Now try again. Find the target yourself this time.”

She spends much of her day like that, leaning against that rifle. After she can reliably shoot straight, she and Nicky switch places, and Joe kneels beside her while handing her a pair of binoculars.

“Now,” he says, “you’ll learn how to spot.”

Spotting for Nicky also teaches her how these people communicate during missions. They have spent so long together that shorthand has become the norm, so while she’s grown accustomed to their day by day banter, she gets a crash course on their mission comms while also going through weapons training.

Over the weeks, she gets better. There isn’t much that scares Nile, and having teachers as patient as Nicky, Joe, and Andy helps ease her into the things she’s uncomfortable with. They put her through the wringer, both literally and figuratively, her combat lessons interspersed between language ones. At the end of the fourth week, Nile is confident she can take on a group of men with nothing but the weapons in their hands all by herself; she can also speak Italian at a conversational level with little difficulty, and she’s already working on her French and Arabic. 

Not once do Nicky, Joe, and Andy harm her through the training process — not once do they use their condition against one another as a teaching tool. It’s one of many rules she memorizes alongside the rigorous training she’s put through. Living forever came with stipulations, she learns, and they’re not things to be taken lightly.

Especially each other’s lives. The ghost of Booker’s betrayal still hangs heavy over them, and it’s during a drier day on the weekend that Nile feels brave enough approaching them about it.

Well, she approaches _Nicky_ about it. Andy had gone to town for groceries and Joe was asleep in his room, leaving Nicky and Nile to hold the house down. Nicky is reading as he usually does, curled into the corner of the couch, his long legs folded with his knees propping up his book. He looks close to falling asleep, so when Nile slides close to him, he doesn’t seem to care much.

“What’re you reading?” Nile asks.

Nicky takes in a deep breath and straightens. Her guess that he was falling asleep was right — he stretches, setting the book aside, turning his attention to her.

“Poetry,” he says. His nose wrinkles, a rare expression of disgust crossing his face. “I do not like it, however. Yusuf tells me to keep trying, but I find the language hard to parse sometimes.”

Nile snorts. “Think of it like a song, then.”

Nicky raises a brow. His expression turns thoughtful.

“You think that would help?”

Nile shrugs. “I don’t know. But I like music, and music is kinda like poetry, right?”

“You’re right,” Nicky says. He sounds amazed, like Nile had just told him the answers to all his problems. It makes her smile so wide her cheeks hurt.

Nine hundred years old, and he’s still so enthralled with the little things. She hopes she can be like that, someday.

“I have some artists for you,” she laughs. “We can listen to them later if you want.”

“Thank you. I’d like that.”

He settles back into the couch again, watching her expectantly. At first, his stare had unnerved her — Nicky had a way of looking right through people, though he didn’t mean anything by it. Nile had grown accustomed to it, just like everything else, and now she squirms under it not because he’s looking at her, but because of the questions itching under her skin.

Nicky seems to sense this, and lays a gentle hand on her knee. “Whatever it is, you can ask, Nile.”

Nile sucks in a deep breath. _Now or never,_ a voice inside her says, sounding suspiciously — achingly — like her mother.

“I have some questions,” Nile says. “About — about you.”

Nicky hums. “Me?”

Nile nods. Her fingers tighten into fists, and it isn’t until Nicky is sitting up more fully and taking her hands in his own that she realizes her nails are biting into her palms. He pries her fingers apart, rubbing them soothingly while he looks at her thoughtfully.

She’s about to pull away and apologize when his sad, far away expression clears into something more neutral. “Alright,” he says. “What do you want to know?”

 _A lot,_ she almost blurts, but Nile bites her tongue. “Before. When you didn’t know you were immortal. Andy says she doesn’t remember her family, but… do you remember yours?”

Nicky seems to be expecting this question. He nods, his gaze falling down to their hands. “Yes. My father — he led a parish of believers. I never met my mother. She died during childbirth, and when I was fifteen, my father married another woman barely older than I was. I never really thought of her as my mother.”

Nile swallows thickly. He speaks so quietly, so matter-of-factly, it spears her right to the core. She flips their hands so she’s soothing him, rubbing her thumbs over his broad palms.

Nicky smiles at the silent apology. “It’s alright. I remember, but it was so long ago now.”

“I know,” Nile says. She feels tears burn behind her eyelids, and instantly Nicky’s expression drops — he seems to realize what he’s said the same moment she looks away.

“I’m sorry,” Nicky says quietly. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t love them or miss them. I did, for a long time. But for me — my family — I hadn’t seen them for a while. The march to Jerusalem… It took years, Nile. By the time I saw Yusuf on the city’s wall, the sun burning behind him, searing him into my soul, my family was already a distant memory.”

Nile shakes her head, thankful that the tears don’t fall. “That doesn’t make it better, Nicky.”

“No. I longed for them for many years, for the guidance I thought my father could give me. But for me… it was easier. I wasn’t alone. I had Yusuf, even as we tried killing each other for the first couple days.”

Nile laughs a wet laugh. “Y-yeah. Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“I’m sorry,” Nicky murmurs. He pulls his hands away, and she sees again the hesitance that he had the first couple days after Merrick. Some part of himself still hated admitting he wasn’t ever alone like the rest of them — as if Joe was a curse instead of the blessing he really was. 

Nile instantly regrets asking. She takes his hands again, forcing him to look at her, squeezing him tight.

“I just,” she starts, then stops. He’s forgiven her, he knows, so she doesn’t try to force an apology upon him. “I guess I just… wanted some answers.”

“We all do,” Nicky says. “But Nile — it’s alright to feel grief. You’re allowed to miss them, for as long as you must. They will always be a part of you. I may not have had the same connections as you, but that doesn’t mean we are asking you to forget them and move on. They love you.”

Nile nods. Nicky wipes her cheeks, drying her tears with his rough thumb. He tugs her against his chest and for a long time they stay that way, their mixed pain and heartache soothing each other. They are the same, now, even though Nile is taking a long time to acknowledge it. She will grow to bear the pain, just like he does, even though it feels like swallowing broken glass every time the thought crosses her mind.

They end up falling asleep like that. Nicky is warm, and he cradles her against his chest in a way that feels protective. Nile doesn’t realize they had nodded off until a gentle hand is sweeping her braids over her shoulder, tugging them out from under her chin with care.

“Let’s go to bed,” Joe murmurs. He’s standing above them both, hovering with his hand cradling Nile’s upper back. She lifts her head, realizing with some embarrassment that she’d fallen asleep with her face tucked under Nicky’s chin. 

Joe helps her up, then guides her to her room. Andy is there, and with the same gentle touch, she tucks Nile into bed after tugging off her boots and jeans. Nile doesn’t put up much of a fight, instead cuddling into the cool sheets while Andy moves around the room, putting things away and turning off the lights.

Nile is almost asleep again when warm, strong arms wrap around her middle. She is so used to the bulk of Nicky or Joe’s embrace that this one nearly startles her — Andy never touches her when they sleep, even when they’re both dead tired and long for someone to hold them through the night.

But it _is_ Andy. Nile can feel her pulling Nile against her, pulling the covers over their shoulders and settling behind Nile with a sigh. She could be dreaming, but she thinks she feels a kiss fall to her shoulder, as light and fleeting as a butterfly’s wing skipping over her skin as it flutters by. For the first time in nearly four weeks, she finally finds rest without any dreams or nightmares.

——

“So he sent you here?”

Booker nods. He can barely meet Andy’s eyes, but he forces himself to. She deserves that much, at least; he can no longer hide behind his cowardice.

Andy looks at him levelly. She’s always been unreadable, like a mirage in a sandstorm, foggy and without shape. Having millenia of practice would probably do that to a person, and now Booker is staring at the culmination of all that time with the absolute fact that he may be like that someday.

It hurts. He can still see the blood on her side, seeping through her jacket, a warning blare of fire sirens. He’d nearly collapsed when seeing her unmending body, almost like when he’d shot her. When he closes his eyes at night, he still hears the sound of the gun cracking, of Andy groaning and falling.

He’ll never forget it. Quyhn and his family are nothing compared to the way she had crumpled, bleeding, whimpering, mortal and fragile. 

Andy shifting to lean back catches his attention, bringing him out of himself. Booker straightens, and Andy looks pointedly down at the bag next to his feet. Calculating, maybe, how long he thinks he can stay with just one duffel. 

As if they don’t all live on one duffel. Nicky and Joe on less, sometimes — Andy is an enigma, seemingly drenched in the black of night wherever she goes, but Booker has seen how long she spends in the bathroom when they have the time to spare. She isn’t so much the mother of night as she likes to think she is. 

“Is there nowhere else you’d rather be?”

Andy’s raised brow is enough for him to know she’s being serious. She isn’t asking for his sake — she’s asking for everyone else’s.

“If I could have it my way, I wouldn’t be here,” Booker says. “But it’d be too difficult to keep two separate stories straight. At least here, I blend in with the rest of you.”

“About as nicely as a broken leg, but yeah, you’re right.”

Booker snorts. He’s used to the ribbing, but this feels intentional. Andy’s trust in him is broken, he gets that, but it’s not herself she’s protecting.

Booker doesn’t move to climb up the porch steps. This land belongs to Joe and Nicky — as much a getaway for the two of them as it is a safehouse for the four of them. A nearby cattle rancher has been taking care of it in exchange for use of it during the summers for as long as Booker can remember. Besides the place in Malta, this is the only permanent home the two of them own, and Booker is loath to taint it further with his presence.

But Copley had been insistent. It was easier to hide them all in the same foxhole should things go south. He’d been insistent that things _wouldn’t,_ but Booker supposes taking up a new job protecting immortal soldiers came with some hangups. 

Andy continues to stare at him for a few long, tortuous minutes. She leans forward on the porch railing, careful to go slow. The shadow of her injuries — physical evidence of Booker’s betrayal — hangs over her, a constant reminder that she isn’t like the rest of them anymore. Nearly seven millenia, and this is how she goes out. Booker can’t imagine hating himself more than he does now.

After a few terse moments, she leans back. “Give me your phone.”

Booker does. It’s a tiny flip phone, one he bought after getting off the plane. The only number in it is Copley’s, which Andy calls after flipping it open.

The conversation is brief. Andy tosses the phone back afterwards, her lips pressed into a thin line, her eyes wet and dark.

“Wait here,” she says. “Nicky’s almost done with his run.”

Booker’s stomach flips. He’d hoped to make a better impression, to not stand begging at Nicky’s front door for safety not too long after leading evil into his life, his relationship. The last thing Booker wanted to do was to be caught asking for more — and yet.

Booker accepts the punishment for what it is. Andy doesn’t move, sipping her coffee and looking out behind him to the broad yard, at once keeping an eye on him and an eye out for Nicky.

A door opening and closing inside the house catches both their attention, and after several minutes of quiet, Joe comes out the front door, dressed nicely. His beard is freshly trimmed and there’s an eagerness to how he moves that all but screams at who he’s trying to impress, and in seconds it’s shattered as he turns from closing the door to face Andy.

Whatever he was about to say — whatever salutation or platitude, his lips pulled wide into a smile Booker hasn’t seen since that day in Morocco — dies like the light in his eyes as soon as he spots Booker. Booker feels his shoulders come up in an instinctual habit left over from so long ago upon seeing his brother even as Joe’s face crumples in despair instead of hatred.

“Something’s wrong, then?” Joe asks. The question throws both Andy and Booker, and that tight feeling grips his insides, slick and insidious, all over again.

Joe had only wanted what was best for him. Joe was kind and perceptive, always giving and giving and giving even when all Booker could do was take. He and Nicky both; as Booker drank himself to literal death, wallowing in his own self pity, the two of them had been there to pick him up and toss him into bed. Nicky had dragged Booker from bars more times than he could count, and Joe had been there for the morning after talks, quiet and passionate and life-affirming like no one had ever been in his long, pathetic existence.

Joe had done it all — he’d fought for Booker, quick and dirty in mud streets and brick thoroughfares, bar fights after bar fights that Booker couldn’t help himself from starting. Nicky wiped away his sweat, blood, and tears, had tended bad wounds even as his body healed over them, had whispered comforts when Booker had been drowning. They covered each other during missions, they laughed and joked and watched football together, and yet — and _yet_ —

Booker had hated them. Resented them. They had what he couldn’t ever dream of having again. Where he had been forced to watch his family die, to watch them spit and scream and beg for him to save them, had buried them all and tried to walk away only to find himself gripped by their ghosts in his dreams — Joe and Nicky had each other. From the dawn of their immortal existence together, they were Yusuf and Nicolò, Joseph and Nicolas, Joe and Nicky. To come into this never-ending mirage alone was a curse, but to come into it _together?_

Watching them kiss was like inflicting bruises on cut skin. They were kind, and never let themselves be caught doing more than what was expected of them. They were careful, Booker would realize later — careful of hurting Booker and Andy. They knew the blessings they were to each other and never let it show, even though Booker can see the toll it had taken on them both.

Two souls, entwined forever, brought together through some power they still didn’t understand. If they had been a man and a woman, their existence would have been easier. Booker knew without a shadow of a doubt that they were reserved with each other through necessity, and not always because of the pain it so obviously caused their brother and sister. The world was cruel, especially to these two blessed souls. The fact that they were both men never escaped Booker’s peripheral, even as he stewed at the bottom of a bottle.

But that was a sour excuse. He sees it now, plainer than the fraught lines in Joe’s face. This was his family. His _brother._ To resent them was to resent himself. They were all he had, even as they insisted on telling him that they could never replace who he had before.

Once, he would have looked to Andy for guidance. Their pain was the same, but now he knows she’d long accepted her place in the world. Whether that meant she did it alone or together he’d never know. What she chose would always be a war they wouldn’t be privy to. 

But he knows he overstepped. Placed blame where there was none, not even on himself. The fact that he was standing here and not lying in a pool of blood and brain matter was proof enough.

Booker dips his chin. He can’t look at Joe for a short moment, can’t absorb the crisp lines of his shirt and jeans, clean and fluffed for his husband. He’d call it peacocking, but he knows better. This man is hopelessly in love, and instead of resenting it, instead of _hating_ it, Booker lets that word roll over him in a warm, comforting wave.

Because they love him too. Forever and always, they said. _Destiny,_ Nicky would say, and for the first time Booker believes him.

“An old alias is being tracked,” Booker says. He tries not to fidget as Joe glances at Andy. “This isn’t what I wanted either. I was sticking to our agreement. Copley wanted us together while this blew over.”

“ _Mio Dio,”_ Joe sighs. He rubs a hand over his face, ruffling his hair as he drags it up through it.

Andy shifts back, standing up. Her eyes meet Joe’s, and for the first time Booker watches real hesitance enter her expression. It’s small, barely a tug at the corner of her mouth, but it’s there.

“It’s fine with me if it’s fine with you,” she says. She sips her coffee, hiding her expression from them both.

Joe scrubs at his hair. He looks truly distraught, and Booker knows it’s because he’s being torn in half. On the one hand, they both know Booker would turn right around and leave if he was told to. On the other, the very real threat of being captured was still fresh on their minds.

He won’t ever forgive himself for that, Booker vows. Looking up into Joe’s frantic eyes, he promises to always carry that weight for him. No one should have to watch their other half be tortured and killed. No one should have to watch it happen knowing their brother had a major hand in making it so.

“Nicolò,” Joe says. He squeezes his eyes shut, sighs, and drops his arm. Defeat lines his shoulders like a Sisyphean weight. Booker yearns to take it on for him, even for a little while, should he be allowed. 

Nicky’s name is all he has to say. Andy nods, and Booker leans down to pick up his bag. 

And then Joe is bolting down the steps, suddenly. Tearing down the gravel driveway towards a familiar figure as it jogs up the long road to the farmhouse. Booker drops his bag, turning to face both his brothers as they come up, their raised voices reaching him before they do.

“Nicolò, _tesoro, amore, mie stelle — per favore_ _!”_

“Why are you here?” Nicky shouts. Joe is trying desperately to stop him, but it’s apparent Nicky’s blood is still hot from the run. He ignores Joe, pushing past his placating arms until he’s nearly in Booker’s face.

Booker doesn’t move, but he does concede. He looks down, away from Nicky’s furious expression, away from the hurt and pain plain on his face. Anger has never looked good on Nicky. Never has Booker felt guiltier than making a kind, quiet man like Nicky angry.

“I need to hide,” Booker says. “I don’t know from who or what, but Copley needs me out of the way.”

“We have dozens of places to hide,” Nicky snaps. “You can hide somewhere else, _le Livre.”_

Nicky is hardly, if ever, vindictive, either. Booker can count on one hand instances when Nicky wasn’t able to control the outright fury burning inside him, and every time it had been directed at someone who had hurt his family. He’d done it for Booker, too, after one memorable bar fight that nearly gave them away because Booker’s wounds healed too quickly. Nicky had covered it up by being loud and angry, shouting obscenities Booker hasn’t heard from his normally reserved brother ever since.

To have them hurled at him, even just his name, feels like salt water being poured over lashes. Booker has done this. He has twisted Nicky, his brother, into this scared, defenseless fraction of himself. He had nowhere to run, not even this sacred place he had built with Joe. To walk here as he was, as a liar and traitor, was to stomp all over the vows these men had taken to himself and each other over and over and over.

Booker nods. He makes himself look at the raw pain in Nicky’s eyes. Makes himself look at the way he strains against Joe’s arms holding him a hair’s breadth away, at the rage making his hands shake, at the man Booker has made him be. He takes it as it is and accepts it as his penance, holding this image of Nicky close right beside the one of him strapped to a table, to his skull slick with blood, to his shirt pocked with bullet holes.

“What do you want,” Nicky seethes. “ _Booker.”_

“ _Pace_ _, ya amar,”_ Joe says. “Nicolò, please —“

“You know your price,” Nicky snaps. He shoves away from Joe — the first time Booker has ever seen him do so. The devastation on both their faces is enough to tear the earth right out from underneath him. “Now go and pay it.”

Joe steps away. There are tears in his eyes, tracking down his cheeks in dark lines. Booker watches, frozen, as he retreats up the steps and back into the house. Nicky wavers, forever drawn to his other half even as he stands stubbornly in front of Booker, glaring death. Booker nearly drops to his knees to start begging, but he knows that’d only be another slap in the face.

Instead, he gestures to the house, to the man hiding inside, nursing a broken heart. Nicky’s eyes track his hands before jumping up to his face again, defiance flashing bright underneath the hurt.

“Go to him,” Booker urges. He shakes his head when Nicky sucks in a breath to argue. “He needs you. Just... please. I’m not here to shatter the peace. I’m doing what’s safe for everyone —“

“You’re too late,” Nicky snaps, low and dangerous. “You had a chance to do what was right and you blew it. It’s too late, Booker.”

He brushes past Booker without a look back. He slams the front door behind him, the sound echoing inside Booker like a death toll signalling his end. So many times has he followed that broad back — so many times has he trusted that man with his fragile, immortal life. Nicky has crushed him and left him to rot where he belongs, but instead of feeling hatred or heartbreak, Booker feels like some sort of justice has just passed over him.

This is the first step, he tells himself. He’d gladly walk this Earth for one hundred years alone after this — he’d gladly pay whatever price he must if it meant he could see his family again.

But this?

This was justice, too. His just dues for committing the worst against those he loves. He takes it, and holds it close to his tender heart just like he does with the faces of his first family. The wound is fresh, but it’ll heal, just like the rest of him, just like the push and pull of this tangled web of a family he’s forever grateful he gets to call his own.

——

The next morning, she wakes up to an empty bed.

Nile is usually the second to last to wake up. She and Joe are late sleepers, with Andy and Nicky rising long before they probably should. This isn’t new, so waking alone doesn’t bother her. Even with the warmth of Andy’s arms around her still lingering, Nile gets up, gets dressed and manages to braid her hair into something presentable before joining the early birds in the living room.

Only she doesn’t find Nicky and Andy at the kitchen island. She finds Joe, alone, sitting on a stool facing away from her with his head bent low. He doesn’t seem to hear her as she approaches, only looking up when her hand sliding across his shoulders startles him.

“Nile,” he says weakly. “I’m sorry, I — I didn’t hear you.”

His brow is furrowed, lines forming at the corners of his eyes. He looks angry and petrified all at once. The fingers of his left hand twist around his wedding band, twirling it around his right ring finger. Nile hadn’t understood why only Joe wore a wedding ring for the first few days, but after they’d gotten to this farmhouse, Nicky’s ring had appeared on his right hand. He said something about being prone to losing it on missions and having to do this big elaborate setup to buy it back after one particularly botched fiasco, and after, he’d taken to giving it to Joe for safekeeping when out on a job.

Now, Joe is worrying it like she’d never seen him do. Nicky’s ring is nowhere to be seen, on his hand or near his person, so at least his other half hasn’t been sent away on a mission.

And then the front door slams open, rattling the windows and nearly knocking over a standing lamp in the corner. Nicky comes storming in, angrier than Nile has ever seen him, his face a dark stormcloud as he marches right past Nile and Joe. He yanks open the door to his shared room with Joe and slams it closed behind him, the pictures hanging on the wall nearby jumping on their nails.

Nile turns a shocked look to Joe. Joe shakes his head, barely able to move, as Booker — _Booker_ — comes slinking through the front door not a moment later.

“The fuck is he doing here?” Nile asks incredulously. Andy comes in after him, looking not too pleased either, and shuts the door much more gently than Nicky had opened it.

“We may have had a security breach,” Andy explains coolly. “He’s here to lay low.”

Booker shrugs. His eyes roam the room, steadfastly ignoring Joe’s hunched form at the kitchen island. “Not my first choice either, Nile.”

“Nuhuh, this isn’t about me,” Nile snaps. She points at Joe, and then his closed bedroom door where she knows Nicky is pacing restlessly. “This is between you and them. I didn’t get captured and tortured for two days because of your shitty decision making.”

“You mean his betrayal didn’t have you factored into it,” Joe snaps. His voice is heated, low — dangerous in a way Nile hasn’t heard since that first night they spent together after everything. It spells certain doom for Booker should he toe the line. “I really hope you have a better excuse than last time.”

Booker doesn’t speak. He looks down, admonished before Joe had finished, looking for all the world like if he could kick his own ass he would do it.

Andy doesn’t let any of them stew for long, however. “He gets the couch,” she announces. Loudly, so Nicky can hear her clearly through the wall. “I expect everyone to be on their best behavior.”

“ _Fanculo il miglior comportamento_ _!”_ Nicky shouts. The bedroom door slams open and Nicky is tearing out of the room faster than Nile expects — he nearly tackles Booker to the floor, but Joe is up and across the room before Nicky can get a hand on his brother. Joe wrestles Nicky back even as his husband spits and shouts.

“You could have had us killed!” Nicky snarls. “Myself, Yusuf — Andy! _Especially_ Andy! What right did you have to take everything away because you were too stupid to ask for help?”

Never has Nile seen him this way, with Booker or with anyone. He is so calm, usually. To see him this way — spitting, angry, pushing at Joe’s arms with a strength barely matched by Joe’s own — twists something hurt and sympathetic inside her. Nicky had appeared to handle his pain well enough in the past few weeks, but it had been only that. 

An appearance. 

Booker doesn’t move from where he’s standing against the front door. He looks smaller than his height suggests, shrunken and drawn as Nicky devolves into shouting in a language Nile can’t begin to understand. After a few heated moments, Nicky stops, the proceeding vacuum of silence broken only by Joe murmuring against Nicky’s cheek as he pushes his husband away, back towards the couch. Space grows between Booker and the rest of them, a cavernous amount that speaks louder than if Nicky had kept shouting.

Andy’s dark eyes flick between all of them. She is refusing to be the first to break the tension — once upon a time, Nile imagines it had been her place to do so. But now, with all these hurts laid out on the floor between them, drenched in blood not her own, she watches as Andy refuses to be the tie breaker anymore.

This isn’t her fight. Andy had fought it, probably more times than Nile could ever imagine. She’d fought tooth and nail to just have a glimpse of understanding, of belonging. And now she had found it, after untold millennia — a bullet and a knife giving her the answers she couldn’t have discovered without them.

Booker had hurt her, sure. He’d assumed the hurt she carried was the same as his own. Atlas had his weight, and so did they, bearing it in tortured silence as the world spun by. They had their burdens to carry, but for Andy, she had found absolution in their weight.

For Booker, he had found guilt and heartbreak, betrayal and deception.

The seconds tick by. Joe has stopped speaking, but his hands still offer apologetic platitudes as they skate up Nicky’s slim hips to his broad shoulders. Joe holds Nicky to him, and after breathing in five, out seven, Nicky embraces his other half with something close to conceded defeat, a sob barking up his throat.

Booker watches this with wet eyes. When Nicky’s arms come around Joe’s shoulders, he looks away, down at the mud caking his boots.

“I’m sorry,” Booker says quietly. Unlike before, in that pristine apartment nearly a month ago, he doesn’t sound angry at himself for saying it. It sounds true, and heartfelt — an apology from a brother to his family. “I — I have no excuse.”

“You never did,” Nicky snaps, and in the same moment, Joe hushes him.

“You’re right,” Booker says. “I never did. What I did, it was cowardice. I looked at what you had and what I didn’t and I — I resented you. You offered the world to me, with all the kindness you had, and I spat on you for it.”

It’s Joe this time that bites back. “We would have helped you. We are your _family,_ Booker. We can help you.”

Booker nods. “I know. I will stay away after this breach is sorted, but I — I know.”

“We will sleep out here,” Nicky murmurs. His tone still carries the same venom as before, but he suddenly sounds tired. When Nile finally tears her eyes away from Booker, she sees he is clinging to Joe as if he can barely hold up his own weight. 

“Booker can have the couch,” Andy insists.

“I will not sleep with a snake at my back,” Nicky snaps suddenly, and that, it appears, is that.

Andy raises her hands. Nicky and Joe both retreat into their bedroom — now Booker’s — and spend barely two minutes inside before they’re dragging all their belongings out onto the couch. Their shared duffel, gun bags, and shoes. Like Andy and Nile, they own very little, their entire lives whittled down to one blue and black nylon bag and their swords from a time long passed.

Booker takes that as the dismissive gesture as it is and hefts his own bag over his shoulder. He disappears into the vacated room, gently clicking the door shut behind him. The tension in the room hardly disappears after him, but for just a slim moment, Nile can breathe.

It’s broken briefly by Joe clearing his throat. He looks at Andy, one brow raised, a silent question passing between them with nothing but their body language to telegraph it.

Andy shakes her head. “Nothing serious. Just a ping on an old alias of his — could be nothing, but I’m not taking chances.”

“So he has to be here,” Joe says flatly.

“Easier to keep an eye on him, don’t you think? Would you rather he was halfway across the world getting captured?”

“There’s a thought,” Nicky murmurs darkly.

Andy fixes a look on him. She can’t exactly fault him. Nile doesn’t blame Nicky and Joe for being so fatalistic, and when Andy finally turns her gaze on Nile, it becomes apparent she can’t either.

The rest of the day passes in terse silence. Nicky and Joe spend most of it outside, sitting close to each other on the back porch. Nile doesn’t feel like intruding — they haven’t had space for each other at all recently, and she knows that must be eating them up just as much as Booker’s return is — but she feels worse staying in the house with Andy’s own heartache. Joe and Nicky don’t seem offended when Nile joins them, so she takes it as a win that they’re placid enough to tolerate her.

Besides, their brand of romance isn’t awkward to be around. Unlike couples Nile’s age, they seem happy enough to just hold each other. The endearments can be a bit much, but nine hundred years together has probably eroded the embarrassment they must have felt at some point at being so plain in their language.

Nile likes it. They remind her of her parents, and to be surrounded by unconditional love is never a bad thing in her book.

“I’m sorry,” Nicky says after a while. Nile had been playing a game on her phone — in airplane mode, like she’s always kept it now — so she nearly misses his quiet apology until he’s lifting his head from Joe’s shoulder. She meets his sad eyes with a raised brow.

“You don’t gotta apologize to me,” Nile says. “I know you would have punched him if you could.”

“I’d have regretted it. But yes, I would have.”

“I still might,” Joe grumbles. 

“ _Amore,_ please,” Nicky sighs. “Let’s just get through this one day at a time.”

“There’s a price, Nicolò. You even said so!”

“And you cannot seriously expect me to believe that you’d rather he stay out there alone while his identity is compromised. At least here, he can’t be taken away.” He sighs, rubbing a hand over his face. “I am not too prideful to say I wasn’t wrong. Angry, yes, but that doesn’t give us an excuse. He’s our brother, Yusuf.”

“He committed the worst crime he could against us,” Joe begins, but Nicky shakes his head.

“I know,” he says. “And now we must bear the consequences, just like he does. I do not want to feel this angry anymore.”

“ _Ya eazizaa,”_ Joe whines.

“ _Hayati._ Please. I do not wish to see you as I was just now.”

“You are pretty scary like that,” Nile mumbles. Joe snorts, and Nicky’s smile is genuine, if a bit embarrassed.

“So you see, Yusuf. Please. Let’s move on from this. For Booker and ourselves.”

Joe gripes in Arabic under his breath. Nile has to hide a smile behind her hand at the childish roll of his eyes.

Nicky swats him lightly on the shoulder for his trouble. He catches Nile smiling, and she knows he can’t help returning it by the gleam in his gaze when their eyes meet. His grin is small, hurt, but still amused. It’s easy to make Nicky laugh when Nile searches for the right buttons.

“Come,” Nicky says suddenly. He stands, tugging Joe up to properly kiss him before holding a hand out to Nile. Nile takes it, graciously tipping her chin as Nicky kisses her fringe as well. 

“Where’re we going?” Nile asks.

“To hit each other with sticks until one of us surrenders,” Nicky declares, and with one final kiss to Joe’s cheek, Nicky spins on his heel and leads them both to the sparring pit they’d been using to train Nile in takedowns. Nile and Joe glance at each other, but in the end, it doesn’t take much convincing to take up arms against each other.

Their “arms” end up being actual tree limbs Nicky breaks off a nearby tree. They’re each about as long as his sword, and thick enough that they don’t bend when Nile swings it — perfect for getting a little more aggressive than they could have had they been using real weapons. Nicky settles into an aggressive stance once Nile nods her head, and at Joe’s shout, they descend on each other.

All these weeks of training, of fighting and learning and living, the swing of their bodies around each other finally feels natural. The tree limb is no sword, but it provides a quality of realness that they couldn’t have gotten otherwise. Nile isn’t afraid of hurting herself or Nicky, now. She can swing and catch his arm in a blow and all that’s left as evidence of her attack is a red scratch that heals between one blink of her eyes and the next. Nicky is more careful of hurting her, but he doesn’t hold back, and for the first time since meeting him she discovers just how strong he really is.

Nicky is _fast_ , too, and after several minutes of sparring, Nile is already panting. He hasn’t landed a blow, either out of deference to her or from her own show of skill, she isn’t sure, but it’s just enough to keep up her confidence as Nicky descends on her rapidly. She doesn’t realize what he’s doing until he twists their sticks around each other and disarms her with a jerk of his arm, her makeshift weapon clattering to the dirt, a wicked smile on his face.

Nile isn’t offended. She simply laughs and picks up her stick again, realizing now what he’s doing.

Blowing off steam, sure. But this is another lesson she must carry with her, now and always: what he says and what he does can be two different things, and she must always be aware of someone’s deceptions.

He disarms her two more times before she gets the hang of his advances. She learns his reach — which is long — and the lengths with which he can keep going before he switches tactics. She can see it in his eyes when he discovers she’s got him, and she considers telling him that his eyes give him away. Then again, these altercations with strangers don’t last nearly as long, and she likes knowing him well enough to guess his tells.

They fight for a while. When Nicky tires, Joe takes his place, and it’s like learning a new dance all over again. Where Nicky had been aggressive and swift — totally at odds with his genial nature and sniper’s patience — Joe is calculating. Nile is tired, panting and sweating, but she steps up against him with the same amount of energy as she had with Nicky, never surrendering, never backing down.

Joe wouldn’t let her, anyway. The fight is slower as he picks and chooses his openings, though Nile suspects it’s partly on purpose. Not every fight will be against an opponent trying to end you as quickly as they can. Sometimes it’s a dance, a show of force as much as restraint, and while Joe isn’t quick to attack her, he is quick to poke holes in her defenses as swiftly as Nicky had disarmed her.

Nile sees their immortality, then, between one strike and the next. The learned ability to kill, maim, disarm before a bullet can be fired or a shout of alarm can be raised. She can see the centuries weighing their shoulders as they decide to swiftly end her in whichever way they can rather than instill in her a sense of cruelty they could so easily manage. They’re tortured men, brought to arms for a purpose they barely understand. Copley’s wall of research is still fresh in her mind — but then again, maybe that was on purpose, too.

They’ve been doing this since the beginning with no clear reason why. With eternity laid out before them, it would be easy for anyone else to seize such an opportunity and use it for their own gains. They could have become cruel, ruthless beings, using their age and strength against her to show her that this is no blessing they carry on their tired, broken shoulders.

 _A curse,_ Booker had called it. To watch all that you loved, all that you knew, crumble and wither and die. Nile can’t imagine it, can’t look at the world around her and imagine that in one thousand years it’ll all be gone forever.

And yet the evidence of it happening is standing before her. Joe and Nicky — Yusuf and Nicolò. A product of their time, old and weathered and still clinging to the slim memories of times long eroded away. But they’re here, moulded just as much by the time they were born as the time it took to get here. They wear matching silver bands on their right hands, symbols of their bond that transcends so much higher than simple marriage. They have grown, adapted, and to think of this as anything but the curse she thought it was is foolish.

She’s suddenly angry, then. At Booker. At Merrick, may the Devil take him. Booker had allowed evil into their lives. She hardly knew him, but looking at these two men, her _brothers,_ her _family —_ she feels nothing short of hatred for the hurt inflicted on them.

Joe’s stick clattering to the dirt gets her attention. He’s wrapping his arms around her before she can think to push him away — but then, why would she? His arms are strong around her, protecting her from the sudden onslaught of her thoughts and worries. She couldn’t deny the comfort even as it reminds her of everything she has lost.

“Don’t hate him,” Joe murmurs. The words are small, and tired. Worn in a way that Nile knows he’s been repeating them to himself for weeks. “Nile, there’s so few of us — so don’t. If not for his sake, then for yours.”

Her fingers curl into Joe’s sweat-damp shirt. She can’t help the burst of anger that leaps up her throat, threatening violence even as Joe’s hands cradling her temper it.

“If anyone should be angry, it’s you,” Nile says, “but to look at either of you and feel _resentment —“_

“He is still young. He lost his family not that long ago.”

“And so did I!” Nile shouts. She pushes Joe away — or, she tries to. He holds her to his chest, refusing to let her thrash and throw blows. She hates him for the same short moment it takes to hate herself for feeling that way towards him. 

“I know,” Joe says soothingly. “I know, Nile, and no one is denying that. No one is asking you to forget.”

“But we have each other,” she says lamely. “I may not — may not know you guys that well still. But you’re all I have. All _he_ has. I can’t… I can’t hate you.”

Realization hits Joe. She can feel it in the way his body drops, tension bleeding out of him like a badly-packed wound. His hands slide down her arms, gripping her biceps and holding her close, a soft press of lips coming down on her hair before he steps back to really look at her.

“Nile,” he says with a smile. It’s soft and so quintessentially _Joe._ She’s not sure he doesn’t know how to love so completely and thoroughly, not for Nicky or herself. She’s sure he was born with the ability to love fully without having to be taught how. “You will never be Booker. There isn’t a bone in your body that’s as hurt and bitter as that man in there.”

Nile sniffs, rubbing her sleeve against her cheek to catch falling tears. “Not a very nice thing to say about your brother.”

Joe snorts. He kisses her hair again, then lets her step away, his expression torn between looking sad and elated.

“I think he would agree with me,” he says. His lips flatten some, his smile disappearing. “I’ll talk to him. Not today, but we’ll talk.”

Nile shakes her head. “No, I’m not asking you to do that. If anyone should be coming to anyone, it’s him —“

“No. You’re right. He’s our brother.” Nicky comes around her, holding his arm out for her. Nile slots herself against his side, wrapping her hand against his ribs. Feeling him breathe is a comfort.

“He deserves a chance,” Joe finishes.

“Even after you gave him a hundred-year time out?”

“Especially because of that,” Nicky says. He squeezes her tightly as Joe presses against her other side. Being squished between them is nearly like being between her mom and brother, warm and protected.

She gets it. They would have condemned Booker if they could, but she’s seeing now their acceptance of a power greater than each other. If Booker must be here, they will accept it, even as it angers and pains them. No one deserved to spend one hundred years alone, especially someone hurting from grief because of it.

——

Booker doesn’t come out of his room for the rest of the night. A blessing or a curse, Nile isn’t sure, but it allows for some sense of normalcy to settle over the house in the meantime.

Nicky cooks, and Joe spends a while tapping away at a laptop with Nile. Copley is covering their tracks, but these people haven’t avoided capture for thousands of years without being a little paranoid. Joe isn’t as good at computers as Booker is, so Nile helps him through the scrubbing programs, making sure all traces of their existence from the past few weeks are erased from cell towers and video cameras on their trek to the safehouse.

When dinner is done and put away, the silent question of sleeping arrangements comes up. They all look at each other, debating on who will speak first before Nile breaks the silence out of annoyance.

“Nicky and Joe can have the bed,” she says. She gestures to the room she shares with Andy, and immediately that gets her a smile. 

“You hear that, boys?” Andy says. “Nile is giving up a big bed for the two of you.”

“We aren’t children needing to be coddled,” Nicky grumbles. His tone is clipped, but his eyes dance with amusement. Nile relaxes under his gentle gaze.

“We will sleep out here,” Joe says. “You ladies deserve a good night’s rest.”

Andy sighs. Her patience is thin, and it’s becoming readily apparent even through her good mood that she isn’t interested in arguing.

“I love you both dearly,” she sighs, “but I know the both of you. You’re stubborn to a fault, you know that?”

“Learned from the best, boss,” Joe says with a cheeky smile.

Andy’s smile is soft. And then she goes and drags out the blankets from her and Nile’s room, making a place for them both on one half of the couch. Nile can barely contain a laugh before Nicky and Joe follow suit, grabbing the blankets they had taken from their room earlier and making their bed on the other half of the couch.

Joe lies down first, holding his arm out for Nicky. Nicky settles into place in front of him, Joe’s arms wrapping around his middle, their fingers intertwining against Nicky’s chest as they both lie back onto a pillow set into the corner of the couch. Their usual sleeping position — Nile doesn’t miss the gun Nicky hides underneath the edge of the couch, or the way Joe hooks his leg over Nicky’s, ensuring a quick escape should they need it.

It makes her sad even as Nile quietly mimics them. She places her pillow next to theirs, careful not to smack their faces with her braids as she lays down. Andy stretches out opposite her, her cold feet pressed into Nile’s side, their legs tangling together as Andy takes up the spot closest to Booker’s door — she will be the first person he sees in the morning when he leaves. It’s another concession, one taken so Joe and Nicky can find some semblance of comfort through the night. Nile brushes her hand down Andy’s calf, a silent _thank you_ that Andy returns with a small smile.

“Sleep,” she says quietly. It takes very little to obey her, even as Joe’s quiet snores fill the room.

——

Booker doesn’t sleep for most of the night.

Usually, that means nightmares. Quyhn visits him more often than not, with his family no less frequent. For a while, the drinking helped — until he learned his body metabolized the alcohol quicker than he could enjoy the fleeting numbness it brought.

This time, however, the ghost of a woman he’s never met doesn’t haunt him, and his first family’s memory leaves him be for one blessed night. He wishes they wouldn’t have, even for a little while, because then he wouldn’t have to listen to the sounds of his family breathing together in the other room without him.

He makes himself listen, though. Makes himself memorize their cadence and pattern, even though for three of them, he doesn’t ever imagine forgetting them. It’s a comfort as much as a penance. He deserves this, he tells himself. This is his family, and they’re choosing to sleep apart. 

Joe’s breaths are heavier, deeper, a comfort given their lives could be so quick and cruel. Booker has always envied Joe’s ability to sleep on nearly any surface, though that was one of many things he envied of his brother. Nicky’s breathing is quieter, kept in tandem with Joe’s, a centuries-long rhythm learned through habit alone. Booker can’t even fathom the nights they must have spent together, limbs tangled and sharing breath, the only protection they have against the world. He can’t even begin to understand what it must be like to sleep beside someone for almost one thousand years and still find comfort in their touch. 

Nile is a different sort of rhythm. Nile’s breathing, while new to Booker, carries the same learned heaviness from military training. She’s trained herself to sleep in any situation, even ones like theirs where the threat is still perceived but she’s been forced to live with it. He can’t imagine what it must be like for her, too. Ripped from her family too early, too young, and still she sleeps with the practice of someone used to the faint chatter of gunfire in the dark. 

He doesn’t envy her. He hurts for her, just like he does Nicky and Joe and Andy. She dreams the same dreams as he does, sees the same horrible encroaching darkness suffocating them both. Still, she sleeps, while Booker lies in the dark too afraid to close his eyes.

And then there’s Andy. Andromache — his sister as much as she was his guardian. She’d led him through countless battles that, to her, had been like every other fight. It’d been like any other for him, too, after a while, but still he sees the snow and blood and mud caking his boots, his hands, his face. He’d look for her after every war, after every job, searching for her thin silhouette wherever he could, searching for solace in the God of War. If Ares had touched this Earth, it had been through Andromache, and oh what a curse that could be.

But no. A while ago, he’d envisioned her as shallowly as he could. It kept a certain distance between them, careful and with intent. Duplicity was necessary. His existence required it — or, at least, he had convinced himself it did.

He regrets thinking of her like that. She was more than an avatar of war — more than a cold, merciless god hellbent on bringing them pain and heartache. Andy has walked the circumference of this planet times innumerable, and to hate her like that was beyond callous. 

She loves them. Protects them. Carries on despite not knowing why. It haunts her just like it haunted him, this existence that seemingly has no rhyme or reason for throwing them out like bait to tease Death. But she hadn’t allowed it to taint her, to ruin her.

He listens for her breathing. It’s nearly nonexistent in the quiet. If Booker had to guess, she wasn’t asleep at all, but he’s done guessing his family’s whims and intentions. It’s become very clear that he isn’t any good at it.

The weight of their presence keeps him awake through the long hours of the night. It’s almost worse than the nightmares, but only just. The urge to drink comes to him and he stamps it down just as quickly as it had come, and for the rest of the night, as rain patters against the roof, he listens to his family sleep just a room away, a comfort he had misconstrued as a curse to serve his own selfish whims. 

——

In the morning, Nile’s woken by the smell of brewing coffee. For a few brief moments, she thinks she’s home — and then she blinks her eyes open and takes in the familiar living room. Strangely, that haunting pang of grief doesn’t overcome her like it has for the past few weeks, replaced with a sense of belonging.

She’s finally settled down, she realizes. She relaxes back into the couch cushions, tugging the blankets up over her shoulders. It feels nice, not being weighed down with dread. She can only hope Booker can find that same freedom in his penance before it’s beaten into him by Joe. 

Or, more frighteningly, Nicky.

The morning is still dark, so she dozes for a little while. Nicky and Joe are still sleeping, pressed impossibly close. Nile misses Andy’s warmth against her, but after a few minutes spent awake, she feels her hair being stroked. Andy must know she’s awake, but Nile doesn’t shake her off. The feeling is nice, and puts her back to sleep rather quickly.

The next time she wakes up, it’s to the sound of voices. One is much closer — Joe’s, muffled like he was speaking into Nicky’s shoulder — and the other is behind her, in the kitchen. Nile rubs her eyes and stretches, her movements drawing little attention from the people conversing around her.

“You could have warned us,” Joe says. He sounds far too angry for this early in the morning. When Nile glances up to where Nicky and Joe are lying, she’s greeted by sleepy grey-green eyes.

“Good morning,” Nicky mumbles. He smiles, tired and exasperated. Apparently waking up with an angry husband is just as frustrating for him as every other mortal on the planet.

“It’s not like I planned it,” the second voice says. Booker, Nile realizes. “Copley told me an alias of mine had been used — _without_ me using it. It pinged somewhere in the UK. So I left.”

“How do we know if that’s the only one that’s compromised? You had to have used a passport to get here.”

Booker sighs. Nile can already imagine the defeated look on his face. He always looks like a kicked dog — she imagines now more so than before. 

“Joe, I wouldn’t endanger anyone like that,” Booker says. “You know that.”

Joe snorts. “Do I?” he says incredulously. “Do I know that? The last time I checked, you weren’t the one strapped to a table watching your husband get tortured. _”_

Nicky squeezes Joe’s hand against his chest. “Yusuf, stop.”

“Why am I the only one that’s angry?” Joe snaps, though there’s little heat. “You got to yell yesterday. I don’t?”

“You don’t want to do this,” Nicky says. His expression is pinched, pained. Arguing is clearly something neither himself or Joe are well-versed at, even after so long. Nile wonders what it must be like to hardly argue with someone even over a human lifetime. “I am just as angry, _tesoro._ But Booker has accepted responsibility. He won’t do anything like that again. He is our brother, my heart.”

The last part is said with enough quiet conviction to silence the room. Nile can see the moment Joe accepts defeat — he sighs, pressing his face into Nicky’s neck, his body going loose like the fight has drained out of him. Nile reaches up and pets his hair, earning herself a small smile of appreciation from Nicky.

“We didn’t choose,” Nile says. “We’re all that we’ve got.”

“It’s not me that you have to tell that to,” Joe grumbles.

“I know that what I did was far beyond just betrayal,” Booker says. He sounds hurt, though Nile doesn’t feel too bad for him. “I know that it’s going to take a while to earn your trust back. Joe, Nicky, I — I don’t know how to tell you how truly sorry I am.”

Nicky sits up on his elbow, his hand entwined with Joe’s moving to grip the side of the couch cushion so he doesn’t tip over it. His hair is flattened on one side from sleeping in one position all night, and he looks rather like he’d continue sleeping if he could help it. But he looks over the back of the couch anyway, tired and exasperated, annoyance lining his angled features.

“I don’t want to hear apologies anymore,” he says flatly. He doesn’t raise his voice, but the room stills like he had. The memory of him shouting and pushing at Joe’s arms, red-faced and so _angry_ , still sits fresh in Nile’s mind. 

Nile sits up fully as well. When she looks over the back of the couch, Booker and Andy are sitting at the kitchen island, a pot of coffee between them. Neither of them are looking at each other, and neither are acknowledging the glare Nicky has firmly pointed in Booker’s direction.

But it must be enough that he’s doing it at all, because Booker nods. He swallows down whatever he was going to say and raises his mug to his lips, taking a drink of that instead. Nicky, seemingly satisfied, sits up fully as well. Joe’s hand falls away from his hip, and both of them sigh.

They take turns in the bathroom, enjoying the hot water and the time spent alone. Nile retreats outside after her turn, unwilling to share the same space as Booker. His betrayal may not have originally meant to include her, but the pain it had caused was obvious. His wants and goals hadn’t aligned with his family’s for some time, and while mutual ground had been reached, Nile didn’t feel comfortable partaking in it.

She was still new, after all. There was a lot to be said for old habits.

Nicky finds her later out in the back paddock, behind the barn throwing a knife. He had wanted her to get better at using older, more traditional techniques, and had been over the moon to discover she was quite skilled in many of them. She’d overcome her initial fear of blades — and by extension, close quarters combat — quickly. Throwing a knife was nearly second nature, now. The _thunk_ of it hitting the back of the barn helps her forget the sound of the gunshots from that day in Afghanistan a lifetime away. 

Nicky doesn’t interrupt her. He has his habits, too. Things that calm him down. The sound of Nile’s knife hitting the barn wall is not unlike the sound of his kitchen knife hitting the cutting board while he cooks, and maybe he’s sought her out for that simple comfort. Or maybe, with Booker in the house, he doesn’t feel welcome to sharing a quiet afternoon with his other half.

Nile throws the knife harder than necessary, anger flashing hot through her blood. It hits the barn with a twang, and this time, she doesn’t walk over to retrieve it. 

Nicky turns a raised brow to her. “Everything alright, Nile?”

“Let’s go out,” she says. Nicky’s other brow rises. She retrieves her knife and slides it into its sheath, hiding it in her jacket just like he’d shown her. The flash of pride in his eyes is quickly overcome with confusion as he looks her up and down.

“You understand we are in a very sensitive position,” he says warily. “With Booker on lockdown, any one of us could be targets. We don’t know what’s going on.”

Nile sighs through her nose. “So you’d rather be here, with him, when you can’t even sleep in your own bed? Or mine? Really, Nicky?”

Nicky grimaces. His expression is nearly always something flat and neutral, and to see him frown so much hurts. _She_ hurts.

He seems to understand. His light eyes pass over her, taking in the tremble of her hands that isn’t entirely from the cold. He pulls one hand from his jacket pocket and holds his arm out — an invitation to come closer — and she accepts it.

“Alright,” he sighs. His voice vibrates through him, and he’s warm where she presses her ear to his chest. The steady beat of his heart is a rhythm she has already memorized. “Only for a couple hours. I want us back before dark.”

The antsy, bitter feeling gripping her limbs washes away with his hesitant answer. A month she has spent in this house, and for a week before that, she’d bounced from safehouse to safehouse, foxhole to foxhole, practically living on top of Andy and Joe and Nicky until reaching this out-of-the-way oasis. She can feel in Nicky a desire to leave and simply breathe, so she doesn’t feel bad about using her own cabin fever against him.

“Thank you,” she says. She squeezes him, both arms wrapped around his midsection. He squeezes her back, pressing a warm kiss to her braids.

“ _Sei il benvenuto, mia cara_ ,” he murmurs. “Anything for you.” 

Joe doesn’t take much convincing. At a single glance from Nicky, he’s rising from the porch swing in one fluid movement. He goes inside while Nicky leads Nile around the side of the house, and as they’re rounding the front porch, Joe is jumping down the steps with the car keys swinging around his left index finger.

Nile raises a brow at him. “Andy is just gonna let us take off, huh?”

Joe flicks a glance at Nicky waiting at the car. His smile is genuine, if a bit wan, and again Nile is reminded of just how little time he’s had to heal from everything. Booker’s arrival has ripped off the scab, and while this may end up being a good thing, Nile isn’t sure any of them can predict an outcome just yet.

“She understands,” Joe says. He gestures to the car, and Nile moves to the passenger side. “We have our phones, anyway. Anything happens, we come back.”

“Or meet her somewhere else,” Nicky says. He’s stretched out in the backseat, his long legs resting diagonally across the bench. Nile snorts as she gets into the passenger seat.

“You’re really gonna make me feel bad about dragging you out of the house?” 

Nicky’s expression drops, guilt making his mouth pinch. “No. I’m sorry. We will have a good time, I promise.”

“Not much we can get up to in this part of California, anyway,” Joe says. He turns the key, starting the car. He pointedly waits for Nile to put on her seatbelt before putting it in reverse and turning around in the yard. “Plus, you have us.”

As the car rolls down the packed gravel drive, Nile finds it easier to breathe. She didn’t realize how suffocated she felt in that cabin, even when it was just the four of them. A month she spent there, training and learning and stretching herself as far as she could go. These two men and Andy — this had been her world. She itched to see something else, something new, even if it was just some strip mall in the middle of rural California.

“I think as long as it’s away from here, I’ll be alright,” Nile murmurs.

She looks out the window, watching pastures and rolling green hills pass them by. California is green in the winter — another surprise she isn’t used to. Nicky seems just as enthralled as she is, watching the scenery flash by, his forehead resting on the window as Joe takes them out onto the two lane highway that’ll carry them to town.

It’ll be fine, she tells herself. They need just a little bit of space. Booker was too large of an unknown, and to expect either of these men to come to terms with their grief so quickly wasn’t fair. If Nile can get them out, even for a few hours, maybe it’ll feel like what she misses the most: a family to love and cherish, even as the world around her keeps shifting and changing.

——

While they’re in a small part of the north state, they’re still relatively close to some entertainment and shopping centers. Ten minutes out and they’re rolling through a mall parking lot searching for a spot close to the nearest entrance, bumping music from Nile’s saved library on her phone.

“It’s not so bad, I guess,” Joe says as they’re walking through the parking lot. His fingers are laced with Nicky’s, their hands swinging together between them. With her friends, Nile would usually feel like a third wheel, but Joe and Nicky are quickly becoming brothers to her instead of feeling like an awkward meetup with people she doesn’t remember well anymore. “You said they’re a rap group?”

Nile laughs. “Not really a group, but yeah. It’s all about delivery.”

“Like poetry,” Nicky says, giving her a private smile.

Nile knocks her elbow into his. “Yeah. Exactly like poetry.”

“If you’re the reason he finally starts to understand anything other than the literal written word, I’m going to be incredibly upset,” Joe sighs.

“She has a new perspective, _habibi_.”

“You grew up reading the bible! Nicolò, nothing can be harder to interpret than the bible!”

“The bible is written to be recited to the uneducated masses, Yusuf. You know just as well as I the power in its spoken imagery.”

Joe sighs, long-suffering. This is clearly an argument the two of them have hashed over quite often, and the exasperated look he gives Nile says it all.

She raises her hands. “Nuhhuh. Not touching that.”

Joe groans. “Nile, you’ve got a cross around your neck! Talk some sense into him!”

“Lecture a guy several hundred years older than me?” Nile snorts. “Nah, man, that’s between the two of you. I’m not gonna get my butt verbally kicked over an argument you guys have been having since the stone age.”

Nicky smiles, pleased, and Joe rolls his eyes. Joe opens one of the many doors to the entrance to the mall, allowing both Nicky and Nile to head in before following after them. He twines his fingers around Nicky’s again, the both of them falling into step as Nile takes the lead. Joe gestures to the many rows of shops and the food court ahead of them when Nile turns a questioning brow at them both.

“This is all you,” he says. “I think the last time either of us did any serious shopping, Nicolò spent an undisclosed amount of money on a particular rifle you shot a couple days ago.”

“What a pair of weirdos you two make,” Nile laughs. She turns back around, feeling more confident with them behind her. She’s quickly learning what it will be like to fight with them — their quiet reassurance that they will always be there warms her through even as her heart aches for a family she can no longer return to. She picks a direction and leads them to the first high-end clothing store, determined more than before to show them a piece of _her_ world now.

Joe reassures her not to look at any price tags, allowing her to wander a little bit as he and Nicky start picking through racks and shelves. She notices the two of them don’t let her leave their line of sight, so she does as well, absorbing the lesson they’re teaching her even as they’re trying to blend in and relax. She’s quickly learning that, even in innocuous situations like this, they won’t ever truly stop trying to help her adapt to this new world she’s living in.

Like chameleons, they blend in with the crowds walking and shopping around them. Nicky and Joe are quiet but to the untrained eye, look like any other couple hanging out with their friend at the mall. They orbit around her, coming back every few minutes at her beck and call as she holds shirts up to herself to see what they like. It feels good, she realizes, to be like this and see them this way. It reminds her that even though they’re immortal, they can still enjoy small moments like this with her. 

Joe is much more receptive to shopping, she discovers. He shares many interests that she does, even if he doesn’t have the terminology to match, though she thinks it has more to do with their shared love of art than his very real lack of any time spent in this decade. She finds some nice clothes for herself while also managing to shirk her instinct to look at how much she’s spending — Joe has no problem handing over an eye-popping amount of cash when they finish at the first store, and it’s at that point she finds she really, _really_ enjoys going out with him.

He laughs freely and indulges her much more readily than any boyfriend ever did before she was shipped overseas. He has a careful eye for matching colors and styles, and while Nile is pretty sure he’s never seriously looked at the figure of a woman since meeting Nicky, he knows what looks best on her, and after the second store, she leaves feeling better about herself than she has in a long time. 

The new clothes certainly help. There’s only so much cheap Walmart apparel she can handle, even though she knows, logically, why they can’t do this often. 

Still. Wearing something other than a Fruit of the Loom shirt from a pack of five is nice. Nile never knew how much she despised Fruit of the Loom until she discovered that was all Andy bought when they were on the run. 

Nicky, though, is a problem. 

Nicky is much more laid back, perfectly content at following Joe and Nile as they try and outdo each other with the latest styles. He’s quiet, giving his two cents when Joe and Nile ask for it. Surprisingly, he has a good eye for these things as well, even though it seems to solely be for Joe. He picks out a couple pieces of jewelry Nile ends up liking, however, and his advice on whether darker or lighter jeans look better on her helps her pick the lighter ones. 

His placid smile never goes away the entire afternoon. Joe is much more boisterous about showing his enthusiasm for the day out, but Nicky is too, in his own way. He kisses Joe when they come together and he offers to carry Nile’s bags after they hit the third store. Even as Nile and Joe try to bully him into buying something other than nondescript tee shirts and dark jeans, that easy, barely-there grin never leaves his face. After the fourth store, Nile executes her plan, winking at Joe before resting her hands on Nicky’s shoulders and steering him towards their fifth stop for the day.

He obeys the push of her hands with a quiet laugh. “Am I being accosted?”

“C’mon, man,” Nile says. “I just spent my paycheck three times over on new clothes, and your husband over there is looking fresh off the runway. You really want to look like that next to us?”

Nicky looks down at himself. His jacket is a nondescript canvas grey zip-up, as well as his shirt and jeans. The only remarkable thing about him is his wedding band — standing next to Joe, he looks _plain._

“You do need something nice, _habibi_ ,” Joe says, his smile tugging his lips wide, showing his crooked teeth. His hand slides under Nicky’s jacket as he leans in for a kiss. “For Nile? Please?”

Nicky sighs. He accepts the kiss, then relents under Nile’s hands, giving up whatever hesitation he may have had. “Alright. Do your worst.”

Nile smiles, pleased. “I will, don’t you worry.” 

He has such a nice figure, with wide shoulders and thin hips. It’s really quite sad he hides it behind such boring clothes, even though Nile knows the reason why. But she squashes that thought down — they’re here to think about something else. They’re here to have a good time, even just for a little bit. 

Nicky is pretty, in that Greek sort of way, so finding something nice that fits him is easy. He’s trying on different mid-sleeve printed button downs when an attendant ends up wandering over, his eyes roaming Nicky up and down.

“A lot of guys wish they looked like you,” the young man says, not unkindly. Nile and Joe share a glance as Nicky shrugs on a new shirt. “The shoulders, the hips — many guys would kill to have a figure like that.”

He steps too close, sidling up to Nicky while Nicky is too busy deciding whether he likes the top button done or undone (he doesn’t, and really, to have such sharp clavicles like that should be criminal). Nile feels Joe bristle beside her, and without missing a beat, he not-so-subtly steps behind Nicky to curl his hands around Nicky’s waist.

“My husband is quite a looker, isn’t he?” Joe says. His tone is light and sweet, eliciting a quiet smile from Nicky as he fusses, obviously not paying attention. Nile can hear the very real threat in his voice, though. She has to fight back a laugh as the attendant's face turns sheet-white, his eyes darting away from where they’d been lingering on Nicky’s back side.

“Y-yes,” the young man says. “I think the hound’s tooth print is not quite for you, sir. Would you like something more colorful?”

Nicky is _so_ not paying attention. At his complete lack of response, Nile turns a raised brow to the attendant, matching Joe’s not so subtle glare.

“I think we got this,” she says coolly. “Thank you.”

The attendant doesn’t waste time scurrying away. Nile snorts, then moves beside Nicky, elbowing him below his ribs.

“It really doesn’t look good,” she says. 

He sighs. He looks torn, even as Joe’s hands wander around his hips to clasp together over his stomach.

“You think so?” Nicky asks.

“I liked that blue one with the white flowers, _amore_ ,” Joe murmurs.

Nicky relents. Nile and Joe smile at each other, accepting Nicky’s defeat. Dressing him is much easier after that, and he comes out looking much more like his apparent age instead of a nondescript handsome extra in an action film. 

“Thank you, Nile,” Joe laughs. “I swear he knows how to dress up when he wants to.” 

Nile scoffs. “I’m clearly the better looking of the three of us. You don’t have to tell me how good my eye is.”

Joe’s smile is wide and easy. Nicky is smiling too, only slightly embarrassed as Joe and Nile talk between each other about his complete lack of style.

He makes both Joe and Nile promise to cut out the tags later, and as they’re walking to the food court, Nile makes a mental note to tell Copley about their outing. No one knows them here, and only Nicky and Andy have come to town for groceries, but with Booker’s situation, they can’t take chances.

But she feels good. Better than she has in a while, and it’s not just because she’s wearing two-hundred dollar Doc Martens and a jacket that could easily cost more than the average person’s monthly car payment. Joe and Nicky are relaxed as well, talking and laughing and looking much more like a couple than they have in the last month, and Nile feels happier for it.

They’re people, too. The three of them may be immortal, but the human adage of _the little things_ hasn’t been any more applicable than right now. Sure, they spent about fifteen-hundred dollars buying clothes. But after spending the last month learning how to kill and maim with two crusade-era swordsmen, she thinks they probably earned a bit of indulgent leisure time.

Nicky and Joe have _very_ strong opinions about mall food, so while Nile trots off to buy herself pizza — which Nicky is loudly disgusted by — the boys go together to buy freshly baked pretzels. They never truly leave each other’s sight, and after three minutes spent apart, they reconvene at a vacant table that's a few spots away from where others are eating.

“It’s just bread and cheese,” Nile says as she sets her lunch down. Nicky makes a face, one Joe openly laughs at before he controls himself.

“Oh, he likes pizza,” Joe says. “Just not cheap mall stuff.”

“And how often are you in malls, Nicky?” Nile says. “You have some strong opinions for a guy that doesn’t know what Facebook is.”

“I know what it is,” Nicky snaps, though there’s no heat. His smile is easy and unguarded as he picks apart his pretzel. “And I’m just against anything that’s so cheaply made and overpriced. Even pizza.”

Nile rolls her eyes. She takes a bite of her slice, sighing. Anything like this tastes just like home, no matter where she is. “Snob.”

“When you get to be as old as me, you’ll understand.”

“I don’t think we get to pull that card anymore, _habibi_ ,” Joe chuckles.

“I can get you in a headlock in three seconds,” Nile says around a mouthful of delicious pizza. _Fuck you, Nicky_. “Watch your mouth.”

Nicky raises his hands in surrender. He gets up then, leaning down to kiss Joe on his cheek, straightening his brand new shirt with an easy smile.

“I’ll be right back,” he says. As he steps around the table, he pats Nile on the shoulder. “I’ll hold you up to that, Nile.”

He walks off to the restrooms across the food court, disappearing into the thin hallway separating them from the wide, circular space.

Joe snorts while Nile devours the rest of her lunch, partly in spite and partly because if she doesn’t, she’s afraid Nicky is going to appear behind her and karate chop it out of her hands with some ancient latin curse about how cheese and carbohydrates are bad for their immortal, undying bodies.

The minutes tick by. Joe finishes his lunch much more slowly, and when he does, he clears up their mess and dumps it into a nearby trash can. He collapses back into his seat, his smile small and easy. He looks younger than he has in a few weeks, even though he’s in sore need of a haircut. 

“I wanted to thank you,” he says. He gestures around the mall in a vague twist of his wrist, then folds his arms on the tabletop and leans on them. His dark eyes are serious when she meets them, and Nile ducks her chin. 

“I really... really miss Chicago,” she murmurs. The words catch in her throat alongside stinging, burning tears. She swallows them down, determined not to show them now. “But I like you guys. I want this to work.”

“We’ll take care of you.” Joe pats her arm, squeezing just enough that she feels his pulse. “Really, Nile. Thank you. I think we needed this.”

Nile squeezes his hand back. “Yeah. You’re welcome.” Her smile turns sly. “I don’t mind spending your money on new clothes, just so you know.”

Joe laughs. “Yeah, I figured. Between you and me, I don’t mind either. I have some expensive tastes, but Nicolò could wear a burlap sack and make it look good.”

“To be fair, I think you and I could as well.”

“Ah, but I have _actually_ seen Nicolò in a burlap sack.”

Nile sighs. “Right. Crusade warriors, and all that.”

Joe’s eyes twinkle. “Exactly right, my dear. Now you’re getting it.”

His attention turns to the hallway Nicky had disappeared through five minutes ago, now. While still smiling, his expression tightens, his mouth pulling at the corners. Nile flips over her phone, tapping it to wake it and check the time. Six minutes, now, Nicky has been gone. She looks up and meets Joe's eyes, and now his smile is gone.

"It's alright," he murmurs. He doesn't sound at all convincing, and just like the morning before, his fingers begin to twist and worry at his wedding band on his ring finger. The silver flashes in the artificial light, winking in and out of sight.

"Should you go look?" Nile asks. "I mean, to make sure he didn't fall in or something."

Her attempt at lightening the mood falls flat. Dread settles hot and heavy in her gut, and without speaking, the both of them stand from the table.

Joe takes point, leading her across the food court to the hallway. He pushes open the double doors, revealing a very long hallway that runs the length of the two restaurants to either side of it. Joe is practically jogging to reach the restrooms at the end of it, Nile close at his heels, and without hesitation she follows him into the open-door men's restroom on the left.

"Nicolò?" Joe calls. No one is at the urinals, and there's only four stalls, two of which Nile shoves open to check. Joe pushes open the other two, and in an instant his voice rises a few octaves in panic. "Nicolò? _Hayati_ , don't play such a cruel trick on me!"

"He's not here," Nile manages around a growing lump in her throat. Joe frantically checks the stalls again, and when they come up as empty as they were a few seconds before, his arms rise and his fingers grip his hair. Nile tries to calm him, cupping his face, but it's like he barely sees her.

"Maybe there's another restroom," Joe says, tone thin. His face is pulled tight, eyes wide in shock, panic making his movements jerky. "Oh, my Nicolò, please don't do this —“

"I'll call Andy," Nile says. She manages not to drop her phone as she tugs it out of her pocket, dialing the one number of four she has saved in the contacts. "We have to find him quickly."

Joe responds, but it isn't in English — or Italian or Arabic. He jogs back out to the hallway, and Nile follows him, keeping him in her line of sight now that Nicky has disappeared. The phone against her ear rings two times before it clicks, and any solace Nile may have thought to find in Andy's voice is dashed by the other woman's tense tone coming over the line.

 _"What's wrong, Nile?"_ Andy says.

Nile wastes no time. "Nicky's gone. He went to the bathroom, and when we went to go check, he's not here. Andy, he’s gone."

Andy lets out a long breath. Joe is pacing up and down the hallway running perpendicular to the one they came down, checking the walls, the tile floors, his eyes wild. When he stops, leaning closer to a particular spot, Nile freezes — and then Joe shouts, a truly wounded sound Nile has never heard coming from a person before.

Nile doesn't hear what Andy says next. She runs to meet Joe, following where his wet, anguished eyes never leave: a spray of bright red blood arcing up the blue-white paint. It's still wet, some heavier spots dripping down in fat little lines, drawn to their natural rounded points by gravity. The world spins, tipping her vision sideways. She has to throw a hand out to grip Joe’s jacket so she doesn’t fall over even as Joe is barely containing himself beside her. 

_"Nile,"_ Andy is saying, far away through the static roaring in her ears. Nile forces herself to listen, to understand. This is _important. "Nile, what the fuck is going on?"_

Her mouth moves without her telling it to. "Blood," she stammers. "Andy, there's blood —“

A crash behind her cuts her off. She spins around at the same time Joe does, watching dumbstruck as two men struggle to hold a third between them near a set of exit doors at the end of the hallway. The two men are dressed in black tactical gear, but despite all their protection, the man they’re trying to wrestle down manages to drop one of them with a well-aimed punch to his throat.

Nile nearly drops her phone when she realizes who it is that’s fighting off these attackers. Nicky’s brand new shirt and jacket are spattered with blood, and he’s fighting like Joe’s life depends on it. Joe shouts, loud and angry, and then he’s sprinting down the hallway full tilt. He collides with the second man, knocking Nicky out of the headlock he’d been grappled into, and with another swift punch, the second attacker is dropping to the floor.

 _“What the fuck is going on?!”_ Andy yells, loud enough to be heard even without the phone up to her ear. Nile jolts, then scrambles to bring the phone up to answer, her stomach doing nervous flips.

“We found him,” she stammers. “Holy shit, Andy, what the hell do we do?!”

 _“Run,”_ Andy says. _“Nicky and Joe know what to do. I’ll call you later, okay?”_

The line goes dead. Nile doesn’t have to be told twice — she runs to meet up with Nicky and Joe at the exit doors, checking them both over before Joe’s hands descend on Nicky.

“Nicolò, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” Joe babbles. His tears are still fresh, his face flushed red. “Oh, _ya ruwhi_ —“

“ _Mio caro_ ,” Nicky says shakily. He takes Joe’s hands within his own and kisses his fingers. Then he reaches out to Nile, bringing her close against his side. “We have to go. Follow us.”

Nile swallows thickly and nods. He’s bloody and disheveled, panting and exhausted. She can’t keep herself from asking even as they push open the exit doors and book it to the car.

“Did they try taking you?” she pants.

“Yes,” Nicky says, just as breathless. “They were hiding around the corner and managed to get the jump on me. I didn’t know what was going on until they were hauling me up from the floor. I think they know they can’t kill me. There was a knife. I --” He looks down at himself. Blood blooms across his side, soaking his shirt. “I think they stabbed me.”

Nile’s gut drops, heat flooding her veins. If they knew — if these were the same people working for Merrick — if this was _Kozack_ —

They scramble into the car without asking any more questions, Joe taking point in the driver’s seat. He peels out of the parking lot, managing to avoid any major accidents through sheer force of will. He gets them onto the freeway, and for the rest of the ride Nile stares out the back window looking for tails as the setting sun turns the sky purple and orange.

——

Nile wakes to the gentle sway of someone carrying her and the smell of rain on asphalt.

She twists her fingers into the shirt of whoever is carrying her, turning her face into their neck. They’re warm, and she can feel a huff of breath as they adjust her in their arms.

“Are you awake, Nile?” 

Nicky. His voice is low and soothing, vibrating through his chest and throat. She squeezes her arms around his neck and tries not to think about why he smells like blood.

“Where are we?” she mumbles. 

She feels him twist sideways to move through a doorway. “A motel in Arizona.”

Nile straightens. Nicky lowers her to the floor gently, waiting to move his hands until he’s sure she can stand on her own two feet without tipping over. When he straightens, he looks exhausted.

“You guys drove all the way to Arizona?” Nile says incredulously. “Nicky, that's a twelve hour drive —“

“We’ve done it before,” he says gently. “Really, Nile, it’s alright.”

“You should have woken me.”

“Someone has to be rested enough for first watch.”

His tone is teasing, but his smile doesn’t reach his eyes. Nile slots herself against his side, wrapping her arm around his waist. His brand new shirt is stiff with dried blood, and in the waistband of his jeans, she can feel the butt of a handgun sticking out.

Nile sighs. Nicky rests his chin on her head, a long breath escaping him as well.

“Yusuf is finding food,” he murmurs. A concession as much as it is an apology. Nicky is too kind to order her around, even now. “You take the first shower.”

Nile nods mutely. She separates from him, and for the first time since being set down, she takes in the tiny motel room they’re in.

It’s got one double bed, the comforter and pillow cases an off-green that could probably pass for seafoam if it wasn’t for the yellow street lamps outside making them look moldy. The carpet is grey, and an older flatscreen sits on an oak wood dresser across from the foot of the bed. The bathroom is a straight shot from the door leading into the room, and a small closet sits empty in the wall next to it, its plastic accordion partition pulled open. 

It’s about as nondescript as Nile’s ever seen. Nicky closes and locks the door behind him, collapsing onto the foot of the bed with his legs kicked out. Nile squeezes his shoulder before retreating into the bathroom — a white, plain cubicle with a sink, toilet, and tub all packed together on one side — and turns on the shower.

The water pressure is nice even as she washes herself quickly, avoiding getting her hair wet. She tries not to spend much time in the shower, but the spray relaxes the knots between her shoulders, and the headache she didn’t know she had melts away. The towels are surprisingly soft when she dries off, though there’s only two, so she’s careful to hang the one she used up on the peg behind the door, leaving the other for the boys to use. She dresses in what she was wearing before and returns to the main room, feeling more awake and alert than she had. 

Joe greets her with a weak smile as she steps out of the bathroom, waving from where he’s perched on the side of the bed. His curls and shoulders are damp from the rain, and he looks about as tired as he did that night after the Merrick incident. 

“Good to see you up,” he says. “You sleep like the dead, you know.” 

Nile sits beside him. “Could’ve woken me,” she says. “I know how to drive.”

Joe shrugs his shoulders. “We know you can. But we need to lay low. Do you have a history of going to ground in situations like this?”

His smile would be patronizing if he’d been anyone else, but instead it’s soft and kind. Nile bumps their shoulders, shaking her head. Joe hugs her close, squeezing her tightly.

“Thought so,” he says. “Besides, you need the beauty sleep.”

“I’m not the one that got stabbed and nearly kidnapped,” she mumbles. She turns to face Nicky on the bed behind them, raising a challenging brow that he meets with one of his own. Nicky is laid out on his side facing them, his ruined shirt folded up on the bedside table. Joe has unbuttoned and given his own shirt to Nicky, leaving himself in just his grey undershirt. 

“I have a thousand years of getting stabbed under my belt,” Nicky says. “Driving for twelve hours is nothing compared to that, I promise you.”

She frowns. The full force of what just happened — their shopping trip, Nicky’s fight to escape the men holding him, his blood on the wall, his shirt turning black from the wounds seeping underneath it — finally hits her. Guilt clogs her throat, making it hard to speak or breathe. This was her fault. She’d insisted on going. She’d dragged them both out into the open when Booker had just been telling them they needed to hide —

“Nile,” Joe says lowly. His arm slips around her, and on her other side, Nicky’s comforting weight encloses her between them. They box her in, shielding her, holding her close even as tears spring to her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she manages through her throat closing up. “I-I just wanted to feel _normal_ for a few hours. Not immortal, not like I was living on the run. Just like I’d gone out with a couple friends for a while and —“

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Joe murmurs. He presses his lips to her hair. “You’re still so young. Don’t apologize.”

“We know this is hard,” Nicky says. “Whatever is happening, we will get through it. We always do.”

Nile scrubs her face with her jacket sleeve. It still smells new, and it makes her sick. She only wanted a couple hours. Just a little time to feel _real_. And now, they had to run again. The vicious cycle continues, and for one brief moment, she understands Booker’s anguish.

But then Nicky and Joe are rubbing her back, whispering endearments. Dragging her out of her despair and grounding her more solidly than she could on her own. She sits up straighter, wrapping her arms around either of their waists, bringing them impossibly closer as her tears dry on her cheeks.

“We will protect you, _ya eazizaa_ ,” Nicky says into her hair. “There is nothing you can do that will ever turn us away from you.”

Nile thinks about Booker and his betrayal. Finding Nicky and Joe strapped to tables, hooked up to machines and fluids, evidence of their bodies being carved to pieces scattered on steel tables around them. Blood had dried to their skin where scalpels had only hours ago sliced them open, taking from them and _torturing_ them. If they could still look Booker in the eye after everything and call him their brother, what has just happened was nothing.

She swallows thickly, nodding. Joe presses a paper bag into her hands, never leaving her side even as she opens it and stuffs her face. McDonald’s has never tasted any better than it does with Nicky and Joe sitting beside her, shielding her from the oppressive grip of the world trying to pry them apart.

Nicky’s phone rings after their third episode of House Hunters. He answers it, his tone more than enough to tell Nile and Joe that it’s Andy on the other end. She’s a couple hours behind them, in a hotel in LA. She encourages them to keep going to safehouse Artemis, wherever that was. The conversation is over as quickly as it began, leaving the three of them alone to eat the junk food Joe bought at a convenience store during a commercial break. 

“I am going to rest, if it’s alright with you,” Nicky says after a long while. He’s lying on the side of the bed closest to the door, stretched out on his back. He’s been fighting sleep for a while, and finally he’s losing against the droop of his eyelids.

Nile nods. “Yeah, man. Do you mind if I keep watching TV?”

He waves a hand. “No. It’s alright.”

“Want me to move?” Nile goes to get up and switch spots with Joe. She’s been sitting between them on the bed, bracketed in by their shared warmth, but she knows how they sleep — she hasn’t seen either of them sleep apart since she’s met them. 

Nicky turns a tired smile towards her. “Please. I would like to feel Yusuf’s arms around me tonight.”

Nile glances at his bloody shirt on the nightstand. Yeah, she probably would too if she’d gone through what he did the day before. Joe switches places with her, giving her a hug as they do, a silent _thank you_ in the warm squeeze of his arms.

They settle down, Nicky turning to face the door as Joe comes to lay behind him. Nile doesn’t bother hiding her smile as Nicky stuffs his handgun under the pillow before reaching over and turning off the bedside lamp.

“I’ll stay awake,” Joe says. With how small the bed is, the broad expanse of his back presses against Nile’s side as she lays beside him, propping herself up on the pillows. His voice reverberates through her as he sighs. “I won’t leave you alone, Nile.”

She pats his arm, careful not to jostle him too much. “Thanks.”

He hums. Then he kisses Nicky’s shoulder, his tone going soft as silk. “I love you, Nicolò.”

It’s a declaration as much as a solemn vow. He very nearly didn’t get to say those words to Nicky ever again, and the warmth that fills Nile after hearing them washes away whatever lingering guilt she feels at nearly causing their separation.

Nicky replies, but his words are low and slurred. He’s likely already asleep, so Nile turns the volume down and settles against Joe’s back, soaking in his warmth and solid weight, vowing to love and protect them as much as they love and protect her.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bit of a shorter one this time, i'm sorry. any remaining mistakes are my own -- let's get this started!

Booker’s terrified gaze doesn’t leave Andy’s face the entire time she’s on the phone with Nile.

His fear only amplifies her own, ratcheting up beat by frantic beat of her heart in her fragile chest. This can’t be happening. They can’t be moving again. Booker was here, his trail scrubbed clean between the safehouse and Paris. He was careful. He’d  _ promised _ .

She snaps the phone shut and tosses it onto the kitchen counter, staring at it like it may uncoil into a snake and strike her. Booker does as well, frozen in his stool where he’d been all morning. Only a couple hours ago had he apologized to them, and now here they were, set back a whole month in the span of a three minute phone call.

“Boss?” Booker says. His voice is quiet, small, like if he spoke any louder his mere presence would shatter her.

Maybe it would. Andy feels like her skin is composed of spun glass, trembling and vibrating, attuned to the well-being of the other half of her soul. Nicky, Joe, and Nile are in danger. They’re all in danger. One wrong move and she would explode into trillions of pieces — would that be worse than being trapped at the bottom of the ocean? Would that be worse than the agony she feels right now? 

Booker shifting across from her draws her back from those icy, suffocating depths. She takes in a thick breath and straightens, looking him sternly in the eye.

“Artemis safehouse,” she says. “Gather your things. We need to go.”

Booker doesn’t waste a moment. He leaps to his feet and disappears into his room, packing every duffel he can find in the house. Andy does as well, packing first Nile’s meager belongings and then her own from their shared room. When she returns to the living room to start gathering things from there, Booker has already set Nicky and Joe’s duffels on the couch alongside their swords, giving the least amount of time to packing his own things.

Her heart aches. His brothers were hurting, angry, nursing wounds that  _ he _ had caused — and still he cared for them. He accepted their ire and moved forward. For the first time since they’d found him that winter in 1813, Booker was looking ahead towards his future instead of behind into the past.

She goes out to the barn and moves the car stored there to the front of the house. Booker clatters down the stairs when she does, throwing their things into the back. Bags of weapons follow after, and once the car is loaded, the both of them wipe the house down with ammonia before turning off the power and locking it up.

Booker wordlessly gets into the passenger seat before Andy can ask for it. Andy smiles, taking her place behind the wheel, letting that small concession warm her heart before she’s tearing out of the gravel drive and out into the soggy evening.

“Do we know who?” Booker asks after a few minutes. He’s pulled his aviators on despite the late hour, and at Andy’s shake of her head, he reaches between his knees and pulls out his laptop. 

She makes a show of not looking at him, even out of the corner of her eye, as he plugs in the satellite receiver before powering it on. Trust has to come both ways, and she’s willing to bet her mortality in his ability to meet her more than halfway.

Nicky, Joe, and Nile are on the line if he doesn’t. She doesn’t have to say so for her to know that Booker understands.

As rain starts to patter against the windshield, Booker calls Copley, the line ringing out for several seconds in the silence before it crackles to life. Andy lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding as Copley answers, sharing a relieved look with Booker.

_ “You’re calling me quite a lot,” _ Copley says warily.  _ “Is there something going on?” _

“Nicky was attacked at a mall earlier,” Booker says before Andy can. “We need you on point for this one.”

Andy raises an appreciative brow. Booker’s tone leaves no room for argument, even with how quietly he speaks. Pride blooms in her chest, and she has to hide a smile behind her palm.

She regrets sending him away. His punishment couldn’t have been anything but learning to grow, right here beside his family. If they expected him to get better, they had to help him, not lock him away without hope or help.

Later, she tells herself. Later, she’ll tell him to stay.

Copley is quiet on the other end for a while. The only sign that he’s still there is the quiet tapping of fingers on a keyboard, and even then, the sound falls away into the hum of rain hitting the car.

Eventually, the silence is broken.  _ “I found footage of Nicky, Joe, and Nile in a mall near your location, but nothing showing an attack or them leaving.” _

“It sounded like it happened somewhere private,” Andy says. “They’d gone to look for Nicky when he went to the restroom.”

_ “Then there wouldn’t be cameras in a back hallway. You said he was attacked? Was there blood?” _

Andy winces. “Yes. That’s what had Joe and Nile so scared before they found him.”

_ “I’ll send a team to clean up, then,” _ Copley sighs.  _ “I’ll begin erasing footage tonight as well. Most of this is just the three of them walking around, so it should be harmless, but I won’t take chances. Are you all heading to ground?” _

“There’s a place in Montana. We’re separated, but we’ll get there.”

_ “My GPS shows you heading south.” _

“No one disappears by going in a straight line.”

Copley’s scoff is answer enough.  _ “I’ll scrub behind you as well, then. Send me details on their trajectory and I’ll watch them. I have a feeling this may be retaliation for Merrick.” _

Andy rubs her eyes, suddenly wishing she wasn’t driving. “Yeah. You and me both.”

_ “Drive safe,” _ Copley says, his voice softer.  _ “I’ll call you.” _

She remembers the awe in his eyes when the four of them had been in his office after sending Booker away — the sheer amount of reverence he had for what he thought was humanity’s salvation. Andy saw it now, saw the good that they did, even though the  _ why _ still ate at her like a thousand nibbling rats. He believed where no one else had, even when he’d sent his goons after them. He believed in the power of their longevity even now as they were flushed from cover like fowl from the reeds.

Booker cuts the line, looking thoughtful, his mouth set in a loose line. When Andy glances over, he meets her gaze with a raised brow, telling her all she needs to know: he’s thinking the same thing.

She smiles. “You’ve come a long way, you know.”

Nicky and Joe’s swords rattle together in the back seat as they pass over a pothole. Booker reaches back to press them together and lay them flat, silencing the noise, careful and thoughtful in the simple action of caring for his brother’s things.

When he turns back around, he sighs. “I think I still have a way to go.”

“We all do, Book,” she murmurs. “We aren’t going to get there alone.”

He doesn’t look at her, but she knows what the dip of his chin and the shaky breath he inhales means. An acquiescence of both her acceptance and the promise that he won’t have to go away after this. There’s a gossamer-thin line he must carefully walk between his ingrained despair and the bright warmth of freedom this broken little family can give him, but if she can provide a safety net, she knows he can make it across. 

They have to stop in LA sometime around six the next morning to rest. Booker had worked through the night as Andy drove, helping Copley erase their ghostly footsteps as well as keeping a bird’s eye on Nicky, Joe, and Nile via traffic cams. They’re ahead of them by a couple hours in a tiny roadside motel across the Arizona border, their route taking them in a U-shape up to Montana. After a day of rest, they’ll drive again, completing the remainder of the trip in one straight shot. Booker calls Copley to have someone sweep the place in Montana, but after that, they both collapse into bed at their shared motel room and sleep.

Copley calls the next morning to confirm no one had tailed either group throughout the night. He gets into a lengthy conversation with Booker about some technical aspects of making Nicky, Joe, and Nile disappear in the mall that Andy hardly follows — she hasn’t ever been very good at adapting to how quickly technology changes in this day and age. Booker waits to take out his laptop until they’re through the McDonald’s drivethru to continue helping Copley even as he rubs at his eyes with an apparent lack of sleep. 

_ “I’m having a hard time placing the tac gear these guys were wearing yesterday,”  _ Copley is saying. He’d been quiet in the drivethru as Andy ordered, and now he and Booker were diving back into their heavy conversation.  _ “I found footage of them entering a loading bay reserved for the restaurants, but they had no distinguishable features between the two of them.” _

“And there were only two?” Andy asks. “For who were, supposedly, three people that had taken down thirty men in a high-security secret lab just last month?”

_ “That’s the thing. I don’t think they were there for all three of them.” _

“So just Nicky,” Booker sighs.

_ “Or just one of them. Nicky was just a target of opportunity.” _

“How would they know they were there?” Andy throws a meaningful glance at Booker, who shakes his head once, hard. He wouldn’t have done this. Not to Nicky and Joe — not so soon after seeing the err of what he’d done. “Only Nicky and I have gone to town for supplies. Nile and Joe stayed at the safehouse, and of the four of us, Nicky and I don’t have much of a presence in the outside world.”

Copley’s answering sigh is long.  _ “Trust me, I know. Of all the research I’ve done, Nicky probably shows up the least, and that’s probably because he covered the four of you from his sniper’s nest rather than taking part in ops directly.”  _ He sighs again, defeated.  _ “I don’t know, Andy. These guys left no footprint either. Either they’re incredibly lucky, or someone is coming behind them and wiping evidence of them, too.” _

“Which is a way bigger problem than just Merrick’s goons coming after us,” Booker mumbles. He slams his laptop shut, shoving it in his bag at his feet.  _ “Putain d'enfer.” _

Andy rubs the pads of her index and second finger against her temple, fighting back a headache. While the prospect of it being Merrick — or that skinny doctor that had dead eyes and an empty smile — was high, this doesn't feel like retaliation. If they knew where Nicky was and were patient enough to wait until he was alone to grab him, then they knew where the rest of them were. Someone was hiding in the shadows, and Andy wasn't confident this was someone they had any experience dealing with before.

They had waited for Nicky, Joe, and Nile to be alone. They had waited until the three most capable immortals were separated from Andy, who was now mortal. They had waited until Nicky — quiet, reserved,  _ dangerous _ Nicky — was by himself. 

This was not a normal revenge situation. This was a ghost coming back to haunt them from the depths of history, and Andy no idea who it may be. 

"Keep an eye on the others," Andy says. Booker turns a raised brow to her that she meets with a firm shake of her head. "I don't think they're after us for revenge."

_ "I think I'm beginning to see why," _ Copley says. Typing can be heard over the line, and then a moment later, Booker's phone dings.  _ "I'm sending you a list of things I need you to do when you get to Montana. With what's happening, I don't want to take chances." _

Booker is already scrolling through what Andy assumes to be the list Copley sent. His mouth pinches sideways into a frown, his eyes peeking over the top edge of his sunglasses, seeking Andy's approval.

Andy just stares back. Trust goes both ways, she reminds herself. Her side aches where the bullet wound is still healing, pulsing with that mantra that keeps her from saying anything, a constant reminder of Booker's lowest point coming round to bite them. He has to accept that she trusts him on his own without her blood on his hands forcing him to. 

He seems to see what she means. He nods without showing her what Copley had sent, leaning back into his seat again with a little smile tugging at the edges of his frown.

"It looks fine to me," he says. "As long as I can set it up in a couple hours, we shouldn't have trouble."

_ "I'm asking you to stay put for at least four weeks as well," _ Copley says. Andy snorts — as if that's any amount of time that matters. 

"I don't think that'll be a problem," she says.

_ "Just saying." _

"Nicky and Joe aren't the issue here," Andy snaps, unable to keep herself from rising to the implication in Copley’s tone. "And neither is Nile. Wanting to go out and experience being human isn't a bad thing."

Booker is very obviously hiding a laugh while Copley sputters.  _ "Going out is what caused all of this —" _

"Whoever this is would have come to us one way or another. I won't have you slandering my family because they were caught off guard when they thought they were safe."

_ "Booker was just told to lay low!" _

"And you were supposed to cover his tracks." Andy sighs, rubbing at her temple again. "This is pointless. Do your job or don't, Copley. We have no problem disappearing again. We've done this before."

Copley mumbles something Andy doesn't catch.  _ "I'd like to keep this civil. I'm on your side." _

"And you have yet to prove yourself. If any one of them gets hurt, I'll be coming after you, mortal or not. I won't be losing anyone else."

Copley doesn't say anything to that. Booker ends the call after a quiet goodbye, settling into his seat with a pleased smile on his face. 

"That's the Andy I miss," Booker says. " _ Avec feu et flamme. _ "

"I mean it," Andy says softly. "Even you. I won't lose you."

Booker dips his chin. He jogs his knee nervously, though he doesn't say anything in response. He's getting used to this, to being genuine. If it takes a while for him to adjust, that's alright. Andy can wait.

——

“Nile.”

Nile jolts awake at the soft sound of Joe’s voice. Her arms are folded up in front of her, her face mashed between Joe’s shoulder blades. She leans back enough to yawn so she doesn’t suck in a mouthful of his shirt.

“Can you answer the phone?” Joe says quietly. He sounds close to yawning himself. “Before it wakes Nicolò.” 

It’s then she realizes her phone is buzzing in her pocket. Nile fumbles to swipe and answer it, somehow managing to do so without dropping it on either herself or Joe. 

“Hello?” she says blearily.

_ “Nile,” _ Andy says. Her tone is relieved.  _ “Nicky hasn’t been answering. Are you guys okay?” _

Nile rolls away from Joe’s back enough to prop herself up on her arm. “Yeah, I’m sorry, we were sleeping.”

_ “Joe and Nicky are there?” _

“Yes, Andy,” Nile sighs. “Nicky’s asleep. Joe is awake, but barely.”

Joe grumbles. It’s clear he’d rather not be. Nile pats his shoulder before rolling out of bed and onto her feet.

_ “Sorry,” _ Andy says. She sounds like she’s smiling.  _ “I wanted to call and let you know we were moving again. Still a couple hours behind, but we should make it to the safehouse tonight” _

Nile stretches. “Sounds good. We’ll get up and start moving. Anything we should worry about?”

_ “I talked to Copley. He’s been working all night, and so far there’s nothing. Whoever attacked Nicky has either gone to ground like us, or they’re biding their time.” _

“Right,” Nile sighs. “Guess there’s nothing for it, then.”

Andy’s answering sigh is just as exhausted.  _ “No.” _ A beat, and then,  _ “Keep each other safe. If Nicky’s asleep, Joe probably hasn’t rested all night. Make sure you drive the first half today.” _

“I will. Be safe, Andy,” Nile says softly.

_ “You too,” _ Andy replies, just as soft.  _ “See you tonight.” _

Nile swipes to end the call, then stretches her arms over her head. Pops and cracks fill the room as her spine realigns, making Joe chuckle behind her.

She turns around and swats his shoulder as he continues to giggle. "Shut up, old man," she laughs. "What was that about not waking Nicky?"

"I've been awake," Nicky says thickly. Nile would feel bad for waking him if he didn’t sound close to laughing."He's just being an ass."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Joe laughs. "I think I need to sleep."

Nile rolls her eyes. "Then get up. Here in a second I'll be calling  _ you _ snap, crackle, and pop."

That only makes Joe laugh harder. "What did you call me? Is that an insult?"

"Yusuf," Nicky sighs, long-suffering. It only makes Joe and Nile giggle more. 

"She's using her age against me!  _ Amore _ , you know I can't stand for that!"

"Let's get coffee first and maybe I'll let you."

Nicky rolls out of Joe’s arms, batting away his hands as they try to keep him in bed. Nile pats Joe on the shoulder as he gets up as well. Nicky looks incredibly unhappy about waking up, which only makes Nile smile wider. She’s learned that he's not really a morning person when he first wakes, even with how early he’s up every day.

"It's alright," Nile says sagely. "One day you'll understand."

Joe throws his hands out towards her with a scandalized look on his face. "Nicolò! You must see what she's doing!"

Nicky wraps an arm around Nile's shoulders. He smiles down at her blearily. "He's three years older than me. Prod away to your heart's content."

Nile turns her wide grin on Joe. Joe deflates, his shoulders drooping in defeat as he whines.

"My own husband is working against me," he sighs. "What will I do?"

"Get dressed so we can go," Nicky says. He rubs Nile's back before reaching towards the end of the bed and pulling up their duffel. Unzipping it, he tosses a set of clothes at Joe, and then takes out some for himself, looking at Joe with a very pointed raise of his brow.

Joe sighs again, his expression pulled into a very exaggerated sad face. "Nicky," he whines.

Nile snorts. Nicky points at the bathroom, stoic as a slab of marble. 

" _ Uhhhhhg _ ," Joe groans. He gets up and obeys, dragging himself into the bathroom. The hiss of the shower running fills the small room after a moment, followed by the clink of a belt dropping to the tile floor.

Nicky rubs his eyes, sighing. "Impossible."

Nile ribs him with her elbow before gathering what little they brought in with them and starts to pack. "You married him."

"Many times, yes," Nicky says with a breathy laugh. He begins helping Nile, clearing away their trash after their things are put away. He wipes down every surface once that's done, and in the following lull, sits on the edge of the bed. Nile sits next to him, turning on the TV to pass the time as Joe showers.

When Joe emerges with his hair still wet, scrubbing a towel over it, he and Nicky trade places. Nile raises a brow as Joe — after deeming himself dry enough — takes the ruined shirt Nicky had bought yesterday and takes it outside with the rest of their trash, disappearing for a few minutes. Nile tries not to let the panic rise in her throat before he returns, smelling vaguely of smoke. She doesn't have to ask what he did with their trash or shirt.

"No one will ask," Joe says at her raised brow. "Someone burning trash is probably not the weirdest thing someone's done at this motel."

Nile shrugs a shoulder. "As long as no one saw you."

"I'm pretty certain of that,  _ mia cara.” _

His conviction is enough to set her at ease. They sit together watching television while Nicky finishes his shower, and then when they're all together and the last of their things have been packed, they file out to the car parked in front of their room and set off north to Montana.

Nile drives first, like Andy had wanted, with Nicky beside her as navigator. They’re wary of GPS — for good reason — so while Nicky points her in the right direction, Joe takes this opportunity to recline across the back seat and sleep.

She keeps the radio low for the first few hours so she doesn’t wake him. Nicky is quiet as well, reluctant to break the silence. He’s alert, though, keeping an eye behind and around them, ever vigilant even as the hours drag on in monotony.

After the first couple stops for gas and breaks, Nicky takes Nile’s place. Joe asks to sit up with Nicky, which she allows, curling up in the back with a coloring book she bought at the last gas station. Nicky and Joe sit with their hands entwined together in Nicky’s lap, Nile’s playlist playing in the background as the sky slowly turns from grey to purple to a deep, dark blue.

Traffic begins to thin when they get off the fifteen. Towns become further apart, and the sky gets clotted with more stars than Nile has ever seen. The roads Nicky begins to take them down start to get thin and winding, eventually taking them to a small town that couldn’t be larger than three blocks. It’s surrounded by tall pines, but beyond that, flat plains stretch out around them with the faint shadow of mountains on the horizon. 

“We’ll get groceries before heading to the house,” Nicky says. He pulls into a small parking lot running along a strip of buildings that was probably built a hundred years before. A grocer sits lit and open in the middle shop, the front face of it freshly painted a bright white. Nile trots in behind Nicky towards the aisles with food while Joe goes towards the toiletries.

The grocer can’t be bigger than a bodega, but there’s a lot packed into it. Nile helps Nicky pick out produce while he grabs different sealed packages of beef and chicken. Ground beef, steaks, breasts, and fajita meat goes into his basket along with the potatoes and onions Nile chooses. They grab much more in the way of nonperishables than fresh food — ramen and frozen dinners outnumber a lot of what they get two to one.

But the prospect of a freshly cooked meal makes Nile’s mouth water, especially when Nicky raises a conspiratorial brow when they bring everything up to the front.

“I’ll let you choose what I make first,” he says. Nile can’t help smiling up at him, which he returns.

Joe meets them with a basket full of shampoo and other things for all of them. It’s enough to last more than a month, dragging a carefully curious expression from the eldery man scanning everything through.

“Moving in somewhere?” he asks, kind and unassuming.

It’s Joe that takes the lead. “My niece here just got out of the service,” he says, throwing an arm around Nile’s shoulders. “She needed some time away from all the hubbub, so she’s coming with me in my RV for a vacation.”

They look nothing alike besides maybe their similar skin and hair color, but to this guy, it’ll probably pass. He seems to buy their excuse as he bobs his head and takes the cash Nicky hands him for the groceries.

“Going anywhere in particular?” he asks.

“Washington, then down the coast to LA,” Joe says. “Leaving tomorrow morning, actually.”

The guy laughs. “Man, I envy you. A snowstorm is supposed to hit us tomorrow. You guys’ll barely miss it.”

Joe winks. “That’s the plan.”

Nicky takes their bags of groceries. Nile takes a couple of them as well, smiling.

“Thanks,” she says.

“You’re very welcome, little lady. You guys have a good trip now.”

Joe tips the bill of an imaginary hat on his head with a grin, and then they slip out into the crisp night. They don’t speak until everything is loaded in the car and Nicky is driving them out of town.

“I really hope we aren’t going there again,” Nile says nervously. “That was awkward as hell.”

Nicky shakes his head as Joe chuckles. “No,” Nicky says. “We are taking extra precautions this time. Booker’ll come back out tomorrow with Andy and buy more, but after that, we won’t come here. The place we’re going to is more out of the way than California.”

Nile lets out a shaky breath. “Good.”

Joe hums. “It’ll be alright. Nicky will cook and we’ll have an easy night tonight.”

Nicky raises a brow in the rearview mirror at Joe. “Awfully confident I’ll cook for you.”

“ _ Ya hayati  _ — _!" _

Nicky’s grin breaks out, completely unable to maintain a stern face. “Sì, sì, I’ll take care of you, Yusuf.”

After that, they fall into comfortable silence. The road takes them through a bigger town, and on the outskirts of that, surrounded by nothing more than flat rolling plains of grass and stars, Nicky makes the final left turn of the night down a dirt drive a half acre long.

On either side of it is a wooden fence that’s seen better days. It widens out into a grass yard much like the one at the previous safehouse, though the house sitting in the middle of it is older looking. It doesn’t have a wraparound porch, and it’s longer than it is wider. When they file in, it smells musty, as if it’s been left alone for a long time.

Nicky navigates the dark living room before Joe flicks the lights on. Much like the last safe house, the kitchen and living area are all one room, with three doors set into the right side wall instead of a hallway branching off. Nicky sets the groceries down onto the kitchen counter, beginning to put things away, while Joe and Nile dump their sole bag of clothes onto the sofa, a cloud of dust erupting from the movement.

Nile snorts, waving a hand to keep most of it out of her face. “How long has it been since this place was used?”

“Uh,” Joe says. He locks eyes with Nicky, who shrugs and continues putting things away. “Probably within the last three decades? I honestly don’t know. When were cellphones invented?”

“Modern ones or the big brick ones?” Nile laughs. Joe just looks at her, lost. “Seriously? Guys.”

“What?” Joe’s tone is playfully offended. Then his smile grows wide. “The only technology I keep up on is whatever makes Nicolò screa —“

“I don’t want to know!” Nile shouts, clapping her hands over her ears. “Sock! Sock on the door!”

Joe cackles. Nile glares as best she can, but she can’t keep it up. It’s too easy to laugh with him instead, even as he leaves her red-faced and embarrassed.

She leaves him to start cleaning the living room, retreating to the relative safety of Nicky's side as he sorts their groceries. He’s smiling as well, though he's nice enough not to say anything. 

Well, sort of. "He's only teasing," he says quietly.

The heat in Nile's cheeks still hasn't disappeared, and now it flares up, warming her through. "I know," she sighs. "But it's like hearing about your parents having sex. You don't want to hear about it."

Nicky bumps their hips as they come together next to the sink. "Yes, I imagine so. I will tell him to stop."

"No! Nicky, no. I'm sorry, that's not what I meant." God, how did she  _ get _ here —

"We aren't teenagers," he laughs softly. "Nile, it's okay."

She feels her face getting impossibly hot. This can’t be real. Was it? Could it? 

"Yeah, and I'm not either,” she manages. This is Nicky and Joe, she reminds herself. They’re not afraid of the awkward conversations. “If you guys need time alone — or, I don't know, need me to wear headphones or whatever —"

"We have had sex since you've joined us," Nicky laughs. "Seriously. It's alright."

How she got herself into this conversation, Nile doesn't know. It's really like thinking about her parents fucking, but for some odd reason, it eases something inside her to know she hasn't stepped between them like she thought she had. She's spent nearly every waking hour since coming to America with one or both of them. She can't imagine how frustrating it must be for them to babysit her.

But, like always, they seem to have a sixth sense for her circuitous thoughts. "Nile," Nicky sighs, bumping her hip again. "Stop thinking like that."

"I'm sorry," she mumbles. She misses having normal conversations. This was never so hard with her mom or her friends. This was never supposed to happen at all.

Nicky shrugs a shoulder. "I'm not. Carnal pleasures can be appreciated quietly. Don't beat yourself up over something you didn't do."

Nile nods. She starts packing away food again, feeling a weight inside her lifting. Well, at least she isn't as much of a pain as she thought.

After the kitchen and main room are clean, Joe helps her put sheets on the beds. There's only two rooms, much like the other house, and both of them are small. They have a queen bed in each and a small closet to put clothes and belongings, and not much else. A bathroom separates both rooms, equally tiny, though instead of a tub it has a standing shower. She sprays Clorox in it and lets it sit for ten minutes, moving on to vacuuming and dusting. 

Between the three of them, they get the place smelling like citrus and not dust in under an hour. They take turns in the shower, and after that, Nicky shows her how to use the truly ancient washer and dryer in the mudroom at the back of the house. While it churns away, Nicky starts cooking a late meal of pan-fried potatoes and eggs, greasy and smelling just like the diner Nile used to take her brother to in the mornings before school.

"Is this place as old as the other one?" Nile asks when she's nearly finished with her food. 

"This is something Andy owns through an alias," Joe says. He pushes away his plate, folding his arms and leaning on them. The tiny table they're sitting at squeaks as he does. "We don't know how long she's had it, actually."

"Probably as long as the other safehouse," Nicky says. "We haven't been here in a while, either."

It's certainly not as lived-in as the other one. No pictures sit on the walls, and the barest essentials pack the linen closet and cupboard under the kitchen sink. All their clothes are with Andy and Booker a few hours behind them, and Nile doubts these two six foot-something men have anything for her to wear in the meantime.

Joe's grin is wry as she finishes her food. "Yeah, this place is old. We won't be shooting here, either."

"Low profile," Nile mumbles. "Got it."

"It won't be so bad." Joe gets up, gathering their dishes. There isn't a dishwasher here, either, so he flips on the sink and begins filling it with hot water. "We'll buy board games or something."

Nile shakes her head. "How about some sleep first? I'm seriously beat."

Nicky rises, urging her up with a kind hand on her back. "We will stay up for Andy and Booker. Try and sleep, Nile."

She doesn't know how she can. She slept so much the day before that now she feels high-strung. That shaky, jittering feeling of being watched hasn't truly left her since they left the mall, and still she feels like she can't leave Nicky and Joe alone. Even imagining herself alone in one of the small rooms nearby — not even ten feet from where she sits at the kitchen table — has her swallowing her heart down as it leaps up her throat, beating hard and wild and nervous.

But Nicky doesn't guide her to one of the rooms she and Joe cleaned earlier. She stands aside at his gentle insistence as he stacks the awful heather grey couch cushions and then pulls out the bed built underneath it, its springs and braces groaning under tension. He fetches sheets from the linen closet, dressing it in cool baby blue, throwing over it a thick wool comforter with the snarling face of a tiger in positive and negative on either side. 

Nile reaches out and pulls him into a hug as he straightens. "Thanks, Nicky," she says into his chest.

His arms around her squeeze her tightly. "Of course. Yusuf and I will be here. You rest."

Nile nods. She retreats into the bathroom to dress down to her shirt and underwear — they left with nothing but the clothes on their back and the cheap packages of shirts Joe bought during a stop at a roadside Walmart — feeling only marginally embarrassed until Joe sticks his arm into the bathroom, a blanket hooked on his fingers.

“Thanks,” she laughs. Joe waves his hand before shutting the door, leaving her in privacy. 

She braids her hair together so it doesn’t tug her scalp during the night, then wraps herself up in the blanket Joe gave her. It’s soft, woven in threads of dark to light golden brown, the fringes around its edge tickling her jaw as she walks out to the fold-out.

Most of the lights have been turned off except for the shaded bulb above the kitchen table where Nicky and Joe are talking quietly in rapid Arabic. Their faces soften when Nile emerges, their conversation stopping. Nile climbs into the fold-out, cocooning herself in the blankets and sheets, blocking out the world as best she can.

“Goodnight, Nile,” Joe says softly. She can feel his hand passing over her shoulder, warm through the cool sheets.

“Wake me when Andy and Booker get here?”

Joe hums. “We will. Sleep well.”

She curls further into herself. He leaves, his voice picking up again in soft, barely-audible words as he and Nicky begin speaking again. Their voices wash over her, lulling her down into sleep like so many nights spent listening to the television drone on down the hall as her parents stayed up, vigilant through the night.

——

It’s nearly sunrise when they pull up the dirt drive, freshly fallen snow crunching under the slow roll of their tires as the sky bleeds blue to pink to a brilliant crushed orange.

Booker had taken over driving some time during the last eight hours, giving Andy a break to sleep. He’s come to this safehouse only one time before, but like all things since waking into this immortal nightmare (no, not a nightmare, not anymore, not  _ ever _ again) he has memorized the path to this place since the last time he came here on horseback instead of by car.

The 2006 Camry Nicky had gotten from Copley sits in the driveway beside the detached garage, covered in a layer of snow. Booker pulls in next to it backwards, cutting the engine before reaching beside him and jostling Andy awake.

She straightens almost instantly under his gentle touch. “Already?” she says thickly.

Booker hums. “Yeah, boss.”

Andy curls into her jacket before climbing out of the passenger seat. Booker follows her, gathering their things from the back while Andy pulls things out of the trunk, loading themselves down so they don’t have to make another trip out into the snow. Already the lull in the storm has passed, grey, hulking clouds pushing across the mountains to the west, bearing down and threatening more snow.

Memories erupt between one moment and the next. A noose tight around his neck, cutting into his flesh, at once hot as blood and cold as cutting ice. His neck is broken but he does not die. He cannot, he discovers, as he swings there in the snowstorm for three days and three nights. On the fourth, he frees himself. A year later, when Nicky — Nicholas, back then — finds him in a bar, drowning in scotch, it takes no words for his fellow immortal to understand his phobia of hands coming near his neck.

The feeling of snow clinging to his jeans nearly makes him drop his brother’s swords, but the memories leave him as quickly as they had come. Joe is waiting on the porch now, drawn to the sound of car doors opening and closing, and as Booker climbs the steps of the porch, knocking frost from his boots, Joe’s kind hands reach out to take some bags from his shoulders.

“Thanks,” Booker murmurs. He’s still not sure if he should meet Joe’s eyes — if he should look at Joe at all — but Joe doesn’t hold himself like he thought he would. His face is kind, if tired, and he smiles at Booker like he had before his weaknesses had nearly cost Joe everything. 

“There’s coffee on the counter,” Joe says instead of a  _ you’re welcome _ . It feels like missing a step going down the stairs, but Booker takes the rebuff gracefully. Joe needs time to adjust, too. “Thanks for grabbing our things.”

Booker hands over the pair of swords. Forever they have been together. He doesn’t understand why he could have imagined tearing them apart, even for some brief moment of solace. He doesn’t know how he could have thought going to Merrick was the right choice, now that he’s holding his brother’s fragile lives in his hands.

“Yeah,” he manages after a moment. His throat is tight, making his voice scratchy. “Wouldn’t dream of leaving them.”

Joe’s gracious smile warms him. His hand slides across Booker’s nape, drawing him close into a hug. Booker feels his knees weaken.

Already Joe is pulling him back. Already anger has shifted into longing, already heartache has been nursed and forgiven. Booker could cry from relief, but he’s not sure it’d be appreciated.

Joe doesn’t let him wander far, or hide in his own self-pity. They go through the door together, emerging into a warm house with a fire crackling in the hearth to the left. The familiarity of the place ends there — it’s clear Andy, or Joe and Nicky, have been here and updated everything since 1902.

Nile is a motionless lump under a heap of blankets on a pull-out sofa across from the fire, and Nicky is sat at a small round kitchen table at the back of the house. The kitchen is to the left, with a pot of coffee gurgling on the counter next to a cast iron sink. A dryer churns somewhere further behind Nicky, and to Booker’s right, a set of three doors march down the wall in an even line. Bathroom and bedrooms, he guesses, as Andy opens the first door revealing a tiny room with nothing more than a bed inside it. 

Nicky rises as they enter, coming to take more bags. Most of the guns and ammunition they leave to be accounted for at the kitchen table, while clothing and other equipment gets stored in the bedrooms. Joe shows him to the last room in the house — the third door he saw when coming in — wordlessly giving him a bedroom all on his own, separate and private.

Booker shakes his head adamantly. They did this at the last safe house, and he doesn’t want to do it again here. Not to his brothers that need the privacy more than he does.

Joe makes a face. “Just take it.”

“No,” Booker says. “I don’t need the space.”

“Nicolò and I are just fine on the pull-out.”

Booker would laugh, but when he turns, Nile is still sleeping. Or pretending to be.

“Really?” he says, low so as not to wake her. 

His raised brow is asking more than what he’s implying. He doesn’t mean sex, or anything else Joe and Nicky could get up to. Since being sent away, he has long accepted that what these men do together is solely out of desire for each other and not a desire to hurt himself or Andy. 

He means Nicky being hurt. He means the very real threat bearing down on them, coming dangerously close to shattering whatever sense of peace they have shakily built in Merrick’s aftermath. He knows Nicky and Joe need the space to breathe and find their center, because while they may be a family like no other — while they need each other to survive like they need air to breathe — Nicky and Joe are a unit. A single organism split in two, a single soul separated and together. To say that they haven’t taken the proper time to heal from being betrayed and tortured would be a severe understatement, one Booker would be the first in line to voice.

Joe meets his stare levelly. The shadows under his eyes are deep, indicative of having very little restful sleep in the past few days. But instead of the fight Booker expected to find in his eyes, there’s warmth, and understanding, and a man willing to cross the fragile line in the wet sand between them despite the very visible damage this entire thing has done to him.

Booker reaches across it before it can be washed away in shifting waves threatening to swallow them. He tugs Joe close, wrapping his arms around him, squeezing him as tight as he can. Arms encircle his back, hands clinging to his jacket — Joe returns the embrace without restraint. Booker tries not to think about his wet face pressing against his neck, the tears tracking down his brother’s cheeks that he knew he wouldn’t be able to fight back. He’s always been easy to cry, ever since Booker met him. But instead of anger or grief, this is forgiveness. Instead of resentment, this is absolution.

“You just have to say something,” Joe croaks. Booker clings to him, fighting back the hot tears he feels building behind his eyes. He loses as soon as his grip on Joe tightens. “Please, just say something. I’m begging you to just talk.”

“I will,” Booker sniffs wetly. He finds that he means it. “I will. I’m sorry I didn’t before. I’m sorry I was weak.”

“Fuck being strong,” Joe says. “You aren’t weak for  _ feeling _ . But you aren’t weak for asking for help, either, Book. We love you.  _ I  _ love you.”

“Joe,” Booker croaks. “Don’t —“

“I won’t let you fall into that pit again. I  _ won’t _ .” Joe steps back just enough so he can look Booker in the eye. Already his cheeks and eyes are red and blotchy. Already Booker’s heart breaks even as the man’s — his  _ brother’s _ — gentle hands begin to mend him. “Just talk, Sebastien.”

Booker can’t speak. He can hardly bring himself to do anything at all besides nod like a guileless bobblehead. Joe’s expression crumples at something he must see in Booker and then he’s being crushed against his chest again, hugged so fiercely it nearly begins to hurt.

When they separate, Joe still insists on Booker taking the room. He doesn’t take no for an answer even when Andy tries to step in and delegate, so Booker relents. He stashes his things in the tiny closet, spending as little time in there as possible. He’s done hiding from his family, now. He’s done hiding from the truth.

Nicky volunteers to help Booker with the security system Copley had sent them, which he accepts quietly yet graciously. Of the two, Nicky is the scarier half of Nicky-and-Joe, and not because of how dangerous he can be. It's because he  _ isn't _ , even when angry, even with what Booker had done. Joe is quick to let out his emotions, quick to let them know what he thinks and feels. Nicky, however, is very good at masking his pain, and that scares Booker more than seeing him hurt and shouting. 

He smiles at Booker like the past few days haven't happened and helps him carry in the boxes Copley left them in the detached garage, silent as he follows Booker's instructions. Nicky is taller, so he offers to climb the ladder and drill in the cameras onto the outside of the house and thread wires through the attic. It takes a couple hours, but for nearly two hundred years they have worked as a unit. Falling back into that comfort of having his brother at his back eases the anxious, uneasy feeling squeezing Booker’s stomach. 

Yet, Nicky is not a saint. Booker can't fathom the life he lived before this one -- the dozens and hundreds of lives Nicky was before he was Nicky. Once upon a time, he was a religious zealot driven by his love for God to do unspeakable things. Once upon a time, he thrust his sword through the man he would eventually marry, claiming it was God's will that gave him the authority to do so.

Nicky had gone through a transformation so wholly unlike anything Booker has ever seen before, and had been better for it. He is not a saint, but he is kind like one, and patient like one, and while his nonexistent temper sometimes gets the better of him -- while Booker deserved what he got two days ago, while he understood why his brother had to lash out and show him how he really felt -- Nicky is not an angry person. He isn't a vindictive one.

He wonders what it would be like to go through all of that, to be who Nicky was, and come out the other end a better man. He wonders what it's like to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and  _ know _ he did the right thing by sticking through it. If he would have the strength to even attempt. What would it take? What kind of man would it take, if not a man like Nicky? Like Joe?

"It takes time," Nicky says. Booker jumps, his heart leaping into his throat, beating hard. Nicky is standing on the ladder, drilling in the last camera. He's dusty from climbing in the attic, and when he jumps down, Booker has to resist sweeping cobwebs out of his hair. 

"You sure you aren't a mind reader?" Booker teases. Nicky smiles, tiny like he does. He has no trouble closing the distance between them to bring Booker against his side. 

"I know you, believe it or not. You may not think I do, but I pay attention."

Booker sighs through his nose. "It's not that."

"You think you aren't strong enough. You wouldn't be here if you weren't."

Booker can't answer. It's so much like Joe's forceful assurance, it makes him dizzy. 

Nicky steps away, making space between them again. His lips pinch to one side in a grimace, brow drawing down. He looks down at his gloved hands, suddenly guilty, and Booker really wishes he knew what to do. Instead, he stands there, frozen, as Nicky searches for words in the snow beginning to drift down around them.

Suddenly, Nicky looks back up at him, determination hot in his eyes. "I'm sorry," he says, quiet. "It was wrong of me to yell at you. You are hurting, and I made it worse."

This, Booker knows how to respond to. "It's not like you said anything I wouldn't say."

"But it wasn't right of me."

"And if Joe said it?"

Nicky's smile ticks up, showing a bit of teeth. He loves Nicky's smile. He nearly never got to see it again, and it would have been his fault. He vows to never take for granted that smile, never again, never, ever again.

"Then I would applaud him for being so candid," Nicky says. "So yes, while I may have meant what I said, I should have talked to you instead of yelling at you. You're a man, Booker, not a child."

Booker shrugs a shoulder. He misses the weight of his flask in his jacket, if not the taste and burn of alcohol, but he's long thrown it away. He did that night after Merrick. Never again is he allowing something so trivial to control his life, his family.

Nicky dips his chin. "I love you, Sebastien. You must know that."

Booker can't fight back the tears. "You and Joe both," he laughs, voice thick with them already, “ _ really  _ want to see me cry today."

Nicky's hand on his bicep is warm through his jacket. "Yes. Because we are here for you. I need you to know that."

Booker nods, scrubbing at his face with his jacket sleeve. Nicky hugs him, then gives him his space, stepping back and up the ladder again. He cries quietly, but doesn't move to wipe the tears away again. He lets them cool on his cheeks, the coming snowstorm sapping away their warmth as quickly as they track down his chin. 

Nicky helps him install the motion sensors around the yard and down the drive, then takes stock of their ammunition once everything outside is taken care of. Joe had gone out to buy firewood, coming back with eight cords and a beat-up pickup truck that's seen many better days. When Booker asks how much he spent for it, Joe simply smiles, wide and radiant. 

"Enough that the nice old man I bought it from won't ask questions," Joe laughs. "Wave enough cash, and old country guys won't bat an eye."

Booker snorts. "Or he knows it won't last the winter."

Joe punches his shoulder. "In that case, he got a free five thousand."

_ A chance to do some good _ , Nicky had said a month ago. Booker smiles, small and private, as he helps Joe haul the wood up onto the porch to shelter it from the oncoming storm. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not much to say this week, only that next chapter is going to be a bit more plot intensive. i know this is a pretty slow beginning, but i hope you like what i have! let me know what you think!

It snows all week.

Nile is used to it. Chicago had wet winters, with the tail end of the year always crusted in ice and snow drifts. Her mother would always take them out, Nile and Lewis and herself, to the park after a fresh storm had rolled through the night. The snow was always clean and soft, and the three of them would spend hours making snow angels and having snowball fights with the local kids. 

She misses those quiet mornings in the park. She misses her mom, and Lewis. Outside, the world is silent, reflecting back her grief in an endless echo chamber of white.

Seasonal depression was hard to manage as a mortal. Now, it seems like she has it all the time, even as she tries to look on the brighter side of eternity. She refuses to end up like Booker, his shaky steps towards redemption be damned. She won’t let her longing for life destroy the person she already was.

Nile spends most of the week with Andy, Joe and Nicky, letting Booker have his space as he seems to prefer. He’s a part of this little strange family, but he’s still walking on thin ice, even with apologies and amendments made. 

Every time she looks at him, she aches to see him whole, to see him like he is when his eyes are bright and clear and free from the grips of his own demons. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens enough, and those are the better days they spend in isolation. 

Most days, it’s the four of them plus Booker on the sidelines doing menial, boring housework. This old safehouse doesn’t have an HVAC system, so Joe and Nicky spend a lot of their time out chopping wood in the early mornings. Neither of them seem as happy with the cold weather like Nile does, so she makes them coffee in the morning, using two mismatched thermoses she finds in a box in the basement.

“Oh, I haven’t seen that in a long time,” Joe laughs. He takes the thermos, popping off the metal cap before taking a sip.

“It was in the basement with a bunch of old stuff,” Nile says. “I thought you guys might want something warm after spending all morning in the snow.”

Nicky takes the other thermos with a small gracious smile. “Thank you, Nile. We really appreciate it.”

His accent always lilts at the end of her name, clipping the syllable. It makes her smile.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says. Joe raises a suspicious brow, setting aside the splitting axe he’d been using to cut down the cords of wood they bought yesterday alongside his thermos on an upright log. Nile turns her serene smile on him.

“I don’t like that look,” he says warily. Nicky glances over at him over the lip of his thermos.

“Oh?” He seems far too interested in the coffee Nile made. _Good._

“Are you planning something?” Joe accuses. 

Nile tilts her head. Then she scoops up some snow, crunching it between her gloves quicker than either of them can dive behind cover to avoid the beginning of her attack.

Joe shouts when she nails him in the side, the snow exploding against his dark coat. He crawls behind the pickup, using it as a shield while Nile reloads. Nile slinks back around the other side, catching him by surprise, her next snowball landing squarely on the top of his head, white puffing into his curls.

She’s struck from behind by a snowball Nicky throws from an impressive distance away, turning Nile’s attention onto him. She chucks another at Joe to keep him suppressed, then scrambles behind the pile of freshly split wood. Nicky hits her again, once more from a distance that shouldn’t be possible, making her laugh. Of course he’d get her from so far away.

While they circle each other, scooping up snow as they go, tossing curveballs around the garage and cars, Andy joins them in stealth. Nile spots her sneaking against the back porch railing, making ammunition for herself. But instead of joining Joe and Nicky on their team, she splits off towards Nile, narrowly avoiding a heavy shot Joe takes with a yell.

“Looks like you’re pinned down,” Andy says when she gets to Nile’s side. Nile looks beside her to the pile of snowballs she’s accumulated. It’s the only thing standing between herself and failure. Nicky and Joe have cornered her against the Camry with the wide expanse of the empty front yard behind her. 

She has nowhere to go.

Now, however, she has Andy. She grins, wolfish, and presses a snowball into her cold hands.

“You go left,” Nile says, “and I’ll go right. They’re behind the garage.”

“They may split up like we will,” Andy says, but she nods. She takes the offered projectile and crouch-walks around Nile, moving into position at the same time Nile does.

“On three,” Nile says quietly. Andy nods her affirmation. “One, two, three!”

They tear out from cover at the same time Joe and Nicky do. Snow spatters in a cold spray of ice against Nile’s chest at a well-aimed throw from Joe, but clearly neither of the boys were expecting Andy to emerge. Nicky is angled to catch Nile off-balance after Joe’s initial attack, leaving him wide open for Andy to pelt him with snow. He goes down, laughing and red-faced. Joe cries when he collapses, his next throw going wide, narrowly missing Nile by an inch.

“My love!” he shouts in agony. “No, Nicolò, my darling! I will avenge you!”

Andy snorts while Nicky rolls over, groaning.

“Go on without me, _hayati_ ,” he moans. He holds his side as if he were bleeding, and then in a dramatic show of his limbs flailing, reaching for a non-existent lover above him, he goes limp. 

Nile brandishes her next round of snowballs as Joe goes to charge her. “Not so fast!” she laughs, completely unable to keep a straight face.

“I will join him soon!” Joe shouts, then charges, smiling wide. Nile and Andy tackle him into a snow drift, managing to get his flailing limbs underneath their own. Their laughter echoes across the wide open plains around them, warming their limbs as they pin Joe down.

“You’ve been got!” Nile laughs. “This is it for you!”

“ _Amore_!” Joe cries. “No!”

Nicky lies still in the snow, but his face is turned towards them. He’s having a hard time keeping a flat expression as he plays dead, his lips twitching as he tries not to smile.

“We have already taken him,” Andy says stonily. She can’t stop from smiling as well, even as her tone is cold and hard. “Give up now.”

Joe groans. He goes limp, submitting to them both, his cheeks and nose red with the cold. Nile dumps snow down his jacket while his eyes are closed, and he jerks up so fast it knocks both herself and Andy off of him.

“That’s fucking cold!” he shouts. “Holy shit!”

Nile rolls back into the snow, clinging to her stomach she’s laughing so hard. “Your face! The look on your face!”

He truly looks furious, but he’s grinning through it. It’s just like him to be unable to stay angry. He jerks his jacket off, letting the snow fall before quickly yanking it back on. 

“I’ll get you one day, Freeman,” he growls. “Just you wait.”

“I’m sorry! You both looked so miserable, I thought I could help.” 

Nile wipes tears from her eyes as she stands with some help from Andy. She’s dizzy from laughing, and Andy lets her lean against her as the world slowly stops spinning. 

Nicky joins them, snow clinging to his hair and the back of his jacket. He’s smiling even as Joe looks less than pleased, though his other half is smiling as well.

“Snow is not our favourite,” Nicky says. He turns an arched brow on Joe, his eyes expectant.

“Yeah, yeah, I had fun,” Joe laughs. “It’s not my favourite, but I think I’m beginning to see the appeal.”

“I used to do that all the time,” Nile says. Her tone is wistful, but she’s apparently able to keep the despair from showing in her expression, because all three of the other immortals look at her fondly instead of with their customary guilt. 

“And after?” Nicky prompts. 

Nile snorts softly. Leave it to Nicky to pull out the better memories instead of letting her linger on the sad, lonely ones.

“We’d get hot chocolate from Starbucks,” Nile says. “And maybe donuts if mom was feeling like it wouldn’t spoil lunch.”

Andy turns a raised brow on Nicky and Joe. “Well, we don’t have Starbucks, but...”

Nicky nods with his tiny grin. “Sì. What a great idea.”

Joe winks at Nile’s lost expression. She follows them inside at Andy’s warm hand on her back, only realizing what Nicky means when he pulls down a pot, and then some heavy cream and a few Hershey bars from the fridge.

“Are you going to make hot chocolate?” Nile asks incredulously.

“Yes,” Nicky says easily. He tosses an apologetic glance at Joe as he sits beside Nile, still flicking melting snow from his curls. “I will have to use your sweets I bought for you, _amore_.”

Nile turns her shocked look on Joe as he flaps a hand.

“I think it’s going to a good cause,” Joe says. He winks at Nile, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepening with his smile.

“Guys,” Nile begins protesting.

“Let them,” Andy says gently. She sits on Nile’s other side, resting a hand on her forearm. “Might as well if you get something sweet out of it.”

“Now to make donuts,” Nicky says. “It’s been a while, but I think I remember how?”

Nile jumps up to help him. “Can you show me?”

“Of course, _mia cara_ ,” he says. “Let’s make the hot chocolate first.”

He pours her a mug after carefully melting the chocolate in the cream, dressing it as nicely as he can in an old chipped mug and whip cream. Then he pours four more, as carefully and sweetly as he did hers, walking one over to Booker who hasn’t moved from his spot on the couch. Booker says a quiet _merci_ , before taking a sip, letting whip cream cling to his moustache before wiping it away. 

Nile takes a careful sip as well and nearly sighs at the sweetness coating her tongue. She’s missed simple things like this, and while it’s much better than Starbucks, the taste flings her back to cold mornings walking the streets of Chicago with her family. If she closes her eyes, she can imagine them right there beside her, her mom and dad and Lewis. They’d be proud of her, she thinks, even as she aches for them more and more every day.

When she opens her eyes, Joe is looking at her with his sad doe eyes. He wraps an arm around her, wordlessly offering comfort that she cradles just as close as she does the memories of her family.

Joe takes his place at Nicky’s side when his other half begins taking out ingredients to make donuts, so Nile sidles up on the other side, watching carefully. Nicky has broad hands, and he deliberately moves them slowly so she can watch him combine dry and wet ingredients until he has a mound of sticky dough that he kneads with practiced movements.

He steps aside with a small grin. “You try.”

Nile bites her lip. She hasn’t baked at all in her short life, but she washes her hands and takes the dough from him anyway. He places his hands over hers, showing her how the first couple turns, then steps away as she gets the hang of it. After only a few minutes, her forearms start to burn, and she quickly begins to understand Nicky’s strong, sure grip after watching him do this with ease.

After what she hopes is a thorough couple minutes of kneading, he moves a greased bowl that Joe had been preparing beside them in front of her. He places the dough into it, then covers it with a dish towel.

“We will let it sit for an hour to rise,” he says.

Nile stretches her fingers, flexing the ache out of her wrists. “That was harder than I thought it would be.”

“Nicky used to make bread and pasta once upon a time,” Andy says behind them. She’s still at the kitchen table, sipping her hot chocolate. When Nile glances back at her, her expression is kind.

“And how long ago was that?” Nile asks.

Nicky’s expression reveals nothing. He washes his hands while Joe rolls his eyes, fondly exasperated.

“We lived in Italy for a while,” he says, “during a slow period. He may or may not have endeared himself to the local old ladies, who in turn decided to impart upon him the ancient ways of making noodles.”

“As if I wasn’t several hundred years ahead of them,” Nicky says, for once sounding a little annoyed. “They pinched my cheeks, Yusuf!”

“And they did adore you so, yes,” Joe laughs.

“He was quite the town favourite,” Andy muses. “They’d come down to our cottage and say, “little Nicolò, it is a miracle that you have not taken a wife! With your sure and strong hands, it should be impossible any young woman will not have you!””

Nile can’t help but laugh. Andy and Joe do as well, and even Booker chuckles from where he’s bent over his laptop. Nicky grumbles, scrubbing at the counter where they made a mess with the flour and butter.

“Insulting me in my own home,” Nicky mumbles. 

“ _Hayati_ ,” Joe says gently. He meets Nile’s raised brow over Nicky’s bent shoulders. “Italians, am I right?”

Nile covers her mouth before she can laugh out loud. “If this is how he holds grudges, you don’t have to remind me not to get on his bad side.”

“I will instead impart all of my knowledge on you,” Nicky says. “That should be enough to have them rolling in their graves, yes?”

Nile rolls her eyes. “Yes, I’m sure you teaching a black lesbian how to make donuts in the middle of a blizzard on American soil will be enough.”

Her dry tone gets Nicky to laugh, bringing him out of his foul mood almost as quickly as he has fallen into it. He snorts when he laughs, which Nile finds adorable — Joe practically melts on Nicky’s other side at hearing it as well.

“Then it will be so!” Nicky slams the pot he’d gotten down from the cupboard onto the range. Beside him, Joe fills it with vegetable oil, flicking on the burner while Nicky continues. “And then you can teach everything to _your_ wife, and things will come full circle! I will have done my duty!”

It’s hard to argue with that. Nile washes her hands, then dutifully absorbs everything Nicky has to teach her — everything, she discovers, that has nothing to do with making pasta. He shows her how to make glaze, letting her combine and mix the sugar and vanilla on her own while he supervises. He even sets aside a portion for them to dip their fingers in and taste while rolling out the donut dough, a sweet, sticky mess that delights and warms her through.

They cut the donut rounds with the buttered edge of a drinking glass, and then a sharp steak knife for the center hole. Nicky does half and Nile does the other, and when the dough is poked through with donut-shaped gaps, he rolls it together and they start again until they have just enough to make a few donut holes as well.

The cabin quickly fills with the smell of fried dough as Nile gently places the donuts in the hot oil. Nicky doesn’t have much to impart upon her for this — she’s been to enough carnivals and eaten enough funnel cakes to know how to fry dough. Nicky lets her, and soon enough, they have a pile of perfect, golden-brown donuts drying on a plate covered in paper towels, hot and steaming in the slight chill of the room.

“ _Perfetto_ ,” Nicky says with a fond kiss to the top of Nile’s head. “You are a natural.”

“Now I just have to keep myself from eating them all,” she says.

Andy shoots her a sharp look. “Don’t you dare, Freeman.”

“I think all of us have a sweet tooth,” Joe says dryly. 

“It was my idea!” Nile pouts. “I get at least two!”

Nicky hums. “Yes, I think you do. But we have to let them cool, or else the glaze won’t stick.”

Nile pretends not to guard the donuts while Joe and Nicky clean up. Andy pretends not to be staring at them, and Booker is making a point of looking busy, but the smell of fried dough still hasn’t left the cabin, and Nile _knows_ they’re waiting to pounce. She uses Joe as a shield to glare at them both, which he simply laughs and shakes his head at. But he doesn’t move, even when Nicky comes to kiss him, standing guard with her until Nicky says she can start glazing them.

She dips them into the bowl, covering one side of them in the sticky sugar, setting them aside to harden on a cookie sheet. Nicky lets her dip all of them, then lets her lick the bowl, to Joe’s apparent chagrin when he recognizes the conspiratorial look between the two of them.

“Nicky!” Joe whines. Nicky pretends to ignore him, washing dishes in the sink. Nile swipes her finger through the bottom of the bowl again, sticking it in her mouth much to Joe’s loud exasperation. “Come on! You’re going to let her have it all?”

“Yes,” Nicky says, and Nile laughs. He ignores Joe’s arms wrapping around his waist just long enough to finish the dishes. “She did most of the work — you just stood there and oogled.”

“You did oogle,” Booker says.

“Nick- _yyy_!” Joe complains. “You can’t do this to me!”

“I can, and I did. You could ask Nile nicely, perhaps?”

Nile raises a brow at the pleading look Joe gives her, all sad, droopy frown and big brown eyes that normally would break her heart. Instead, she licks away the last of the glaze, setting the bowl in the sink for Nicky to wash, sucking at her finger much longer than necessary.

“Man, that sure was tasty,” she says, as flatly and unexpressive as she can. She laughs when Joe whines, pressing his face into Nicky’s shoulder.

“Demons, both of you,” he says, his voice muffled. 

“It’s not like you’re not going to have any,” Nile laughs. “You’re a big baby, Joe.”

His glare is hot but playful when he whips around to pin it on her. She remembers dumping snow down his shirt, and almost regrets it when he looks near enough for retaliation.

Instead, a slow grin spreads on his face. Nile isn’t sure how to feel about it until he’s stalking towards her, quicker than she was anticipating. She scrambles to escape him, but he’s much taller and stronger — he scoops her up with a growl and throws her over his shoulder while she yells.

“Put me the fuck down!” she shouts. Nile squirms, pounding on his back. He laughs and kicks open the back door, a blast of icy air hitting her, making her shiver and fight harder.

And then she’s weightless, Joe having tossed her over the back porch railing. She floats for half a second before the loud crunch of snow envelops her, shocking her and making her yelp. She jumps out of the snow drift, plucking at her shirt to get the snow that fell down the back of it out, her bare feet feeling like knives are stabbing through them as she wobbles back up the steps. Joe laughs the whole time, even when she tackles him.

They play fight, though Nile puts her all into wrestling him down. Even on the wet wood beneath them, she manages to get her knees underneath herself before Joe can pin her against his chest. She gets him onto his back instead, crawling on top of him and putting all her weight on his chest — he groans and wiggles, then gives up just as quickly, starfishing with his limbs thrown out.

“Don’t ever do that again,” she growls, breathless, a laugh coloring her low tone. He’s breathing just as hard as she is, and he holds his hands up, surrendering.

“I forgive you for licking the bowl clean,” he says. “It won’t happen again.”

She smacks his chest then gets off him, holding her hand out for him to take. He hauls himself up, pulling her into a hug in the same fluid movement.

“I’m going to lick the spoon always from now on,” she says conspiratorially. “I’ll be Nicky’s new favourite.”

Joe laughs. “Y’know, I’m not as offended by that as I thought. You can have all the spoons, _habibi_. I’ll even steal them from him for you.”

Nile hums. “Good. That’ll be your penance for dumping me into a snow drift.” 

“Can’t argue with that,” he says. He leads her back in, reluctant to let her go. Andy is smiling behind her mug when they come back in, and Booker is peering over the edge of the table, curious.

“Who won?” he asks.

“Nile,” Joe says. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to best her.”

Nile knows that isn’t true — he’s lived for so long she knows fighting is as ingrained into him as it is Nicky and Andy. Booker, even, fights with an instinct not bred in him — only people who have lived as long as they do breathe and sleep knowing the things they know, knowing the ways to kill and maim they know. Joe could have easily overcome her, and yet he didn’t. One more kindness given to her; one more sweet concession, one more bend of his knee.

That thought sits with her for the rest of the morning, even when she goes out to retrieve the forgotten thermoses and helps Booker haul in wood to feed the fire. They talk and act like they haven’t lived longer than she can fathom, but when she focuses — when she really puts all her attention on all four of them — she can see it. The tension they carry in their limbs, the awareness, the readiness. Nicky sleeps with a gun under his pillow and Joe with a leg hooked over Nicky’s, always ready. Booker keeps a careful view of all the windows and doors, his back to the wall, his eyes always roaming. Andy sits placidly and calmly, but Nile knows she’s watching, cataloguing, silent in her vigilance even in her newfound mortality.

Nile is surrounded by birds of prey. She sits and nibbles at her donuts, lets the simple happiness of their existence seep into her bones even as she learns to mimic that wariness, that awareness. Nicky and Joe bracket her, and Andy sits before her, and ever in his placid orbit around them, Booker circles, cautious and alert. Nile is surrounded by careful wariness borne from centuries of having to be so, and she takes comfort in knowing that even in their most relaxed and carefree of moments, her family is careful in their protection, in _hers_. 

She is not alone, anymore — if she ever was. She has simply shifted from one place of living to another, from one family to the next, tethered to both from her still-beating, aching heart.

——

As with all things concerning their safety, Booker waits, that little anxious ball of tension never dislodging from its place beneath his diaphragm.

Copley had done all he could. All traces of the security footage at the mall had been erased and fed back with a loop of a previous day, and Nicky’s blood had been cleaned up. For a brief, panicked moment, Booker had interrogated Copley about the “people” he was sending to do these things — and then was promptly reprimanded. High security came with teams of trained professionals that did this for shady government operations on a near-daily basis. This was not outside Copley’s wheelhouse, and it was not uncommon for these things to happen even in public places. Shadow governments had to cover their tracks somehow. Copley was simply the man organizing and executing the clean-ups. 

That he was using these resources to cover for a group of immortals that really could not survive if they were known to any official or unofficial entity, Booker didn’t ask after. What loyalty Copley felt was well-placed, if an enigma to Booker. He was never going to understand it for the eternity he had left, he was sure.

But, he liked the equipment Copley left, and the assurance that came with having surveillance when they usually didn’t. The cameras he and Nicky installed were high-end, recording in a clarity rivalled only by movie production cameras. The infrared cameras switched on at night, and while slightly more fuzzy, they were clear as well, quietly sitting vigilance through the uneventful weeks that passed by. Nothing came to ambush them in the night, and Booker slowly began to relax. They were safe, for now. They had a moment to breathe.

It was a closed-loop system, fed only to Booker’s laptop. He made a point of telling everyone of the daily password change, and always left it charged on the coffee table. Nile was the only one that had grown up with this technology, so she checks it every day.

Having security cameras appeared to comfort her, especially when they revealed nothing new. She teaches Andy how to check them as well — the obvious weak link in their mail when it came to technology — which also seems to ease something in Andy’s weary shoulders. She shouldn’t have to worry, even as they have to spend the next four weeks waiting here.

Nicky and Joe are quick to welcome Booker back into the fold even as they keep a careful distance away. It isn’t as if they act any differently, which Booker would understand. It’s that he’s sure they don’t know _how_. They are creatures of habit, both of them, so while it’s apparent they’re hurting, they slot back at Booker’s sides, ever vigilant and protective as ever.

Joe watches football with him on their shitty little portable TV on the back porch and Nicky pours him coffee that Nile makes every morning. Nicky is careful to make a point of asking Booker if he needs anything, if he wants anything, when Joe and Andy make their trips out to the grocery store. Booker learns that Nicky isn’t asking out of obligation — he’s asking because he wants to make Booker happy. So Booker asks for things, for some sweets or a board game or a new puzzle for himself and Nile to complete. He learns to ask, and that in itself is a step in the right direction.

But he gives them space. They had given him a room, so he makes a point of letting them have some privacy as well. It’s an unspoken thing, something Andy does already and Nile picks up on instantly — these are still two men hopelessly in love. They let Nicky and Joe have long, early mornings, if only to have some time to themselves. It’s only a month and some change from Merrick, afterall, and the attempt to take Nicky is still fresh on their minds. Booker doesn’t miss the longing looks, the drifting, heavy embraces. They need space, and Booker is more than happy to remove himself so they can breathe.

Days pass in relative comfort. Nile’s physical training is put on hold, but her language lessons continue. She speaks Italian like an American, which makes Nicky’s nose wrinkle, but he praises her all the same. He and Nile can hold a simple conversation, though she quickly excels, absorbing vocabulary and tense changes as easily as if she were a native speaker. Her American accent starts to fade when she switches between the languages, her confidence getting stronger. Eventually, she can speak nearly as quickly as Nicky with little stumbling, and she passes her first impromptu test with cheers from all of them, much to her blushing embarrassment. 

Booker sits down with her for French next, which she picks up a little easier. The sounds aren’t quite the same as Italian, but the gendered words don’t trip her up, and the truly awful way French structures sentences sets her back only a day. Booker is proud, and he feels almost like he did teaching his own children how to read and write. He finds he likes it, even though Nile is a grown woman and isn’t afraid to snark at him — it’s clear she dislikes him, but he takes it in stride. She met him during the worst part of his life, so he defers to that anger, that resentment she has towards him. It’s warranted, so when she decides she’s had enough, he doesn’t ask for her back until she’s ready. 

“She’ll come around,” Andy says one day. Nile’s splitting wood with Joe, their conversation drifting over the back yard. Her Italian is quick and strong — Joe talks to her like he would Nicky, rapid and without restraint.

“In her own time,” Booker responds. “It isn’t for me to set the pace.”

“And you’re right not to. You didn’t exactly endear yourself to her.”

“I won’t, even now.” He doesn’t have it in him to even try, if he could. Nile is the best of them, even in her youth. She carries their future just as much as Nicky, Joe, and Booker do — she is the ray of God’s holy light they’d been searching for.

She was the reason they did this — she and every little girl like her. Children all over the world deserved to grow up warm and comforted like she did, with a family that loves and protects them. Copley saw the greater good — and Booker did too, but — but this — Nile, and the simplicity in knowing that at least they could save _her_ —

It was worth it. The pain, the heartache, the hundred years he’d spend atoning. He may not have to do it alone, but he would do it, whatever it took. His future was uncertain, but the world’s didn’t have to be. _Nile’s_ didn’t have to be.

So he does what he can. He teaches her to forge, because one day he may not be able to for them. Joe and Nicky are not always married, he tells her, and sometimes they must pretend to be people they aren’t. She’s a bad actor, but those skills will come with time, so he teaches her to lie on paper before he does to someone’s face. He has her make her own fake license, one that has no resemblance to her old life and name — he doesn’t even keep the same alliteration Joe, Nicky, and Andy have grown fond of using. This world is too smart now, too quick to catch similarities. Her new identity, at least for now, is a Brooke Cambell, an unassuming twenty-three year old studying anthropology on winter break from her undergrad program in California.

They make Nicky and Joe’s, too, as practice. Establishing a paper trail is something she will have to learn with time as well, but some of it can be done digitally, especially with spoofed bank statements and criminal records. Copley is an immensely valuable resource, with access to back doors and dark net options Booker never had before, even with his access to the seedier parts of making people disappear. Having a security expert go over his work and find nothing wrong is always a good feeling, but he does it anyway, because having that extra layer of safety is worth far more than possibly being caught in a mistake. 

Nicky is Andrew Ulrich — much to his distaste for anything German — and Joe is Michael Ulrich. Booker can’t bring himself to separate them this time around, so he doesn’t, even as they may have to disappear again. They’d been living under totally separate aliases for decades now, so he feels they deserve a little connection. Nile helpfully points out that with the marriage laws in the United States, it’s not entirely uncommon. In Montana, yes, but their marriage license can be forged from Oregon or Washington or California. With an eager nod from both Nicky and Joe, Booker does it, thankful both for their blessing and for the opportunity to show Nile how to forge notaries.

The weeks pass by quickly. Booker keeps to himself, establishing a line in the sand that his family respects both for himself and for their own peace of mind. He monitors the cameras and diligently checks the perimeter twice a day. When the snow really starts to set in, he and Joe go out and shovel it so the beater pickup can get in and out when they need groceries. The Camry and Chevy Malibu don’t have snow tires — they knock the snow off them anyway, making sure any and all escape routes are open.

It takes only five days before Christmas for Nile to break and ask for a Christmas tree. Booker had expected her to break sooner — this was her first holiday as an immortal, afterall — but then the thought leaves a sour taste in his mouth. Andy initially resists, but it’s hard to argue against something so innocuous. It’s not like a tree will get them killed.

“They sell them at the grocery store,” Joe says. He’s trimming Nicky’s hair at the kitchen table, the quiet _snk_ of the scissors a pleasant backdrop to the Christmas movie Nile has playing on their ancient television. She managed to convince Joe to buy a VCR and a list of tapes he found at an antique store. The look of utter joy on her young face that day will be seared in Booker’s mind forever.

“Can we go?” Nile pleads. Her big eyes are pinned on Andy, her hands clasped together as she leans over the back of the couch. “Please? We’ll look like anyone else buying a tree. I’ll take Nicky with me!”

Andy clearly can’t resist. Her stony expression cracks, and she nods, sighing long and loud. 

“And Joe,” she says. “I don’t want either of you separated.”

So off they go, Nicky with his fresh haircut and Joe and Nile singing Christmas songs Joe only knows because Nile taught them to him. They take the truck, and Booker watches from the front porch with a wave as they go, feeling a piece of himself going with them.

Andy sidles up next to him, watching them go. Just far enough that only their elbows touch when she leans on the porch railing, but even that one point of contact feels momentous. It feels like that day Nicky found him, drunk and crying in some bar a few months after his final death. Nicky’s hands on him had been warm and full of promise, just like his quiet, sure words. 

“It’ll be alright,” Nicky had murmured. Booker had been drunk enough not to question the hands on him, even as Nicky steered him towards the exit. 

“You’re the man from my dreams,” Booker remembers saying. “Or, one of them. Where’s the other?”

“Soon. It will all become clear. Please don’t cry — I will explain everything.”

Nicky had been so kind. So understanding. He’d taken Booker to an apartment where Joe was waiting, and they did what Nicky had said — explained everything. They did it so that when Andy came, she didn’t have to. Booker wouldn’t understand until he learned of Quynh why his brothers would shield Andy from such a simple pain like explaining what they were.

 _It’s like destiny_. It really is, standing here in the cold with Andy. He still doesn’t quite know why, but being here feels right. For the first time since before going off to war for a cause he didn’t believe in, he can see clearly. 

This is where he was meant to be. These were the people he was meant to protect.

“I’m sorry,” he says. Before it can threaten to choke him, or worse. Andy shifts beside him and he knows she’s looking at him, studying him. He turns and meets her clear blue gaze without fearing it for the first time since meeting her.

“You don’t have to apologize to me,” she says quietly. The _Joe and Nicky deserve it more than me_ goes unsaid, though it’s plain on her face, in the pinch of her mouth and tilt of her brow.

Booker shakes his head. He very pointedly doesn’t glance down to her side where she’s still healing from his betrayal. “I mean it. And I want you to take it. You don’t have to accept it, but I want you to know that I am sorry.”

“I know you are. You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think you were.”

“But I know it hurts.” He sighs and looks away, at the fresh tire tracks the truck had left in the snow. He and Joe have to shovel it again soon. “Joe and Nicky, too. I know it hurts them.”

Andy hums her assent. “It does. But I think it hurts more not knowing where you are. At least here, they can keep an eye on you.”

The sting of distrust doesn’t hurt anymore. He simply nods, accepting it as it is. 

“But if I need to go,” he starts.

“They’ll say so.” Andy’s smile is small. “Joe won’t tolerate you hurting Nicky again.”

“I won’t. Ever again.”

“I know. I’ll kill you if you do.” 

Her depreciating chuckle warms him. Yeah, she will. He looks forward to proving her wrong.

Nile, Nicky, and Joe return before sundown with the scraggliest tree Booker has ever seen in his life. It’s barely as tall as Nicky and about half as wide — but its thin branches are green, full of fragrant pine needles that don’t shed when its shaken. Joe hauls it in, placing it in the cheap plastic base they bought in the gap between the fireplace and the kitchen counter. Nile is swinging a couple plastic bags from her fingers, and when Booker takes a peek inside as she skips up the porch steps, they’re full of paper boxes of ornaments.

“You found all that at the grocery store?” Andy asks. 

Nile dumps the ornaments on the couch, eagerly starting to open boxes and set them aside so everyone can see. Her smile is huge, more brilliant than the glitter of colored glass reflecting the lit fire.

“A little old lady gave them to us,” she says. “She felt bad we were buying a shitty tree and gave us some she was taking to see her grandkids. I tried saying no, but she really wanted us to have them.”

“I admit, I’ve never done this,” Nicky says lamely. Joe shares his wary look — the both of them look put-out, like they were caught wholly unprepared to celebrate a holiday they knew little about.

Which they did. Booker snorts, then picks up a box of ornaments as Nile passes out three others to Nicky, Joe, and Andy. 

“You hang them on the tree,” Nile instructs. She demonstrates by taking out a bright blue glass orb and picking a spot near the top of the tree, hanging it on its thin little wire hook. Booker copies her, as well as the others, much to her delight. “Nice! Glad to see ancient mercenaries such as yourselves can still follow instructions.”

“I follow instructions _very_ well,” Joe mutters, waggling his eyebrows, which earns him Nile’s sharp elbow in his gut. 

“Sock,” she says sternly. “Door.”

“I sleep on the couch!” 

“As if that’d stop you.”

Joe’s expression is scandalized. “It _has_!”

Booker can’t help laughing. Andy and Nile do as well, even as Joe’s expression flattens. Nicky says something low and comforting, which lifts his spirits enough that he starts decorating the tree again in earnest, even though he clearly wants to argue his case. 

Nile is the last to finish, taking up a string of lights on a green cord and threading it around the tree in a looping pattern from its base up to the top. She plugs it in, and instantly the tree glitters in a rainbow of colors, the glass ornaments reflecting the spots of bright lights into a kaleidoscope across the walls and ceiling.

She puts her hands on her hips, victorious. “Almost as good as back home.”

“I imagine yours back home wouldn’t look so thin,” Booker says.

She flaps a hand. “Technicality. But now I have to find you guys presents, since apparently none of you have celebrated Christmas in your lives and I want to see the looks on your faces when you unwrap them.”

“Hey, I celebrated Christmas,” Booker says, offended. At her raised brow and unimpressed expression, he deflate a bit. “Well, we didn’t have trees. Or give gifts.”

“Exactly,” Nile says. “Why don’t we listen to the expert on modern Christmas tradition?”

“She’s got you there,” Andy says mildly. 

“You wouldn’t know a modern holiday if it slapped you in the face.”

Andy isn’t even offended. “Point taken.” 

“Is there a meal usually shared at Christmas?” Nicky asks. At Nile’s enthusiastic nod, he smiles. “Good. You will have to teach me so I can make it for you.”

Nile practically melts. “Really? You’d do that?”

Joe hooks his arm around Nicky’s waist. “You really asking if he’ll cook for you?”

Nile hugs them both tightly. “Thank you _so_ much, you guys.”

Joe and Nicky envelop her between the two of them. Booker feels strangely out of place, but then Nile is tugging himself and Andy closer, and he relents. He wraps his arm around Nicky’s shoulders, and his other around Andy as she squeezes them. Nile is at the center of them, warm and protected — though, now it’s the other way around, isn’t it?

——

The first moment alone after Merrick, he can’t savor it.

Joe shakes when he undresses Nicky and he knows he’s still thinking of that gunshot. Nicky hadn’t felt it, had hardly anticipated it, but Joe had watched it happen. They have seen each other die hundreds of thousands of times. They keep count, and this is just one more Nicky has gained over him.

Joe’s hands shake. A muscle in his jaw twitches, his nose wrinkles, he frowns so deeply and angrily — it takes all Nicky has to soothe his palms down Joe’s arms, lacing their fingers. Joe smells like blood and iron and smoke when he leans close, his hair and clothes filled with concrete dust, but Nicky doesn’t care. He kisses him, and for one brief, blissful moment, Joe is still.

“I am here,” Nicky murmurs. Even after all these years, he falls back to Greek. Their one common language shared between them from so long ago now. It had been all they had when they’d stopped killing each other — all that they could offer each other that wasn’t blood and anger and death.

“I know,” Joe responds. In Arabic this time. Nicky switches to accommodate, turning his face into Joe’s cheek.

“Then come to me. I am here, and so are you. Please, don’t cry.”

Joe does anyway. He is always quick to, and Nicky’s heart splits open a little more every time he witnesses it.

Nicky gives Joe the same courtesy of undressing him, cataloguing every hole in his shirt and splash of blood up the side of his face. His tears clear away some of it, which is both a blessing and a curse. Nicky wipes away both with his thumbs, revealing the beautiful tan of his cheeks. It’s just enough to get him into the shower and turn the spigot.

The water runs red the moment they step under it. Nicky tries not to look — he always tries, for the both of them — but he fails. He can’t help it, even now, even with the acid burn of betrayal still eating them up from the inside. Dark red rivulets catch his attention as they follow gravity down Joe’s chest, his abdomen, cleaning away what Nicky can still see without effort when he blinks.

He washes away each gunshot, each bruise, every slice of the scalpel Kozak and Merrick’s goons had given them. The scars are invisible but they are covered in them, from wounds a thousand years healed over, and still they have more to add to their tired bodies. Nicky laves over all of them first with the soap, and then his hands, careful and quiet. Joe eventually does as well, copying him, drawing from him words he long thought stuck in his throat.

“I will always be here,” he murmurs. Joe’s hands stop at his waist, spanning around his hips in his warm grip. Nicky returns the embrace by sliding his arms around Joe’s shoulders, turning his face into Joe’s wet curls.

“Yusuf, please,” he begs. He can’t take the silence any longer, can’t go on living without hearing Joe’s sweet voice. 

“I’m here,” Joe finally says. He sounds hurt, like something is still stuck inside him. But there is no bullet or blade. Just hurt, and pain, and an anger so real he can hardly contain it. 

He hasn’t seen this in Joe in a while. Not a long time. Not since the second world war, and still, Joe had been able to contain himself enough to still speak.

This was not new, this hot feeling consuming them both. But it was the first time it had been caused by one of their own, by their brother, their _family_. They have lived a thousand years — Andy even longer — and for this to be the first time it has ever happened —

Joe’s hands move again, sliding around the wet expanse of Nicky’s back. His rough fingers find where every bullet had entered Nicky, every long-gone wound from the past forty-eight hours. He had died beside Joe on that table. Had gasped his last breath to the wail of the heart monitor as Kozak had taken her samples, her _pleasure_ at ending them to simply see them revive again. To confirm for herself that a dead thing they were not.

He hadn’t watched Joe die. Nicky had always gone first, succumbing to that heavy pull down into the dark. He would wake to Joe’s deep, dark eyes staring at him, wet and always brimming with tears. They had died together, at least, these hands say. Joe’s touch is a promise that they always will, that the twist of fate shall not rip them apart even when she tries her damndest.

“I’m here,” Joe says again. Heavier, with more conviction. Like he’s trying to convince himself that he is _here_ and not back there in that lab, strapped down, less than a rat, less than alive.

“Where did you go?” Nicky asks, not unkindly. Joe’s hands wander, but Nicky’s don’t stray far. He needs the anchor of Joe’s shoulders under his palms, the warmth of his wet hair against his cheek.

Joe shifts against him, pressing closer. He knows this body better than his own, knows the hitch in his chest and the deep breath he swallows is more than for simply anchoring. Joe is hurt, angry, and trying so hard not to show it.

“Nicolò,” Joe breathes instead. Shaky, torn, like all of his foundation is that one name and if Nicky denies him, he will crumble. 

He won’t. He hasn’t. They had killed each other for three days and three nights after meeting, had tried to keep the demon they found themselves faced with dead in the bloody dirt for far longer than they should. But even then, Nicky could not deny this man, this incredible creature, the patient acknowledgement of all that he was. Always, he had known that Yusuf was a good man. A loving man, a caring one, one that wanted more than what they were given so long ago.

But they’ve been given more. They’d woken from their final death and found purpose, even if it took a while to get here. God may not exist — at least, not in the way they thought it did, and certainly not to serve any one man or religion — but there was _something_ there. Something holy in the curve of Joe’s hands, his kiss, his silver tongue. 

They were fated to be here, even after everything. He searches for ways they could have changed things and finds many avenues not taken, blades put away, words left unsaid. Booker could have said something sooner, _they_ could have said something sooner, but still they were —

— they were here. Joe was here. Nicky was here. They could have done something different, but they hadn’t, _couldn’t_. The past has been walked and now they are here. Together. Alive.

Nicky doesn’t pry for an answer any longer. The water starts to turn cold, so he shuts it off and pulls Joe out of the basin. He dries his curls, his skin, revealing nothing he hasn’t seen before. Joe’s hands don’t leave him, making the task difficult, but Nicky doesn’t push him away. 

He never could. He wonders how it could be for a soul to exist in two bodies, but that is something to ponder for another day.

Ignoring Booker is possibly the hardest thing he’s ever done. He tugs Joe into bed, their bodies coming together on instinct even as Nicky feels the tension inside himself ratchet up. Joe is fighting behind him to breathe, to stay calm, so Nicky does as well. He measures his breaths as Joe’s hands curl against his chest, pulling him ever tighter against the familiar warmth behind him. He counts to five, inhales, counts to seven, exhales. Five in, seven out. Five in, seven out.

He doesn’t know how long he lies there doing it. Joe relaxes, but only because it’s easy for him to fall asleep, even now. Booker is a threat, but he is a neutralized one. Andy is sitting up, their ever-dutiful guardian, even as her own exhaustion must be ripping through her. It is with an immeasurable amount of regret Nicky finally finds himself slipping under even as Booker’s presence bears down, heavy and forceful, across the room yet right above him. 

It is a blessing he dreams of nothing. Just Joe behind him, holding him as he always has. An anchor in the angry, spitting swell of a storm, threatening to drown them both. 

Sleeping in safehouses without Booker is easier. Joe isn’t so tense, even though he won’t speak his thoughts. He’s trying to appear normal for Nile, for Andy, but that trick only works for so long. They get to California and Nile sees right through them to their raw, beating core — after that Joe is not is not so secretive.

“You’re allowed to hurt,” Nicky says quietly. It’s the first week in the California safehouse — once a place they liked to frequent because of how quiet it is. Now it shifts with the added weight of Nile, a calm, warming presence that makes the place more than just Nicky-and-Joe. Joe seems to be sinking into that comfort more and more, revealing more of his tender heart than he has since Merrick.

Joe grumbles, angry at himself and reluctant to say more. He tears his shirt off with more force than necessary — Nicky comes up behind him and soothes him with kisses to his shoulders, his nape, the top of his spine.

“I wish I knew how to deal with this,” Joe growls. He tempers a bit under Nicky’s hands, his core bellowing less like a racehorse and more like a man’s now that he’s been touched. “This is just — bullshit, is what it is.”

“We will get through it,” Nicky says. He bites back his own anger, swallows it down deep. Another day, maybe. Joe needs him more than his gasoline to make it through this.

“I know that, Nicolò,” Joe bites out, then sighs. Nicky isn’t slighted by the bitter tone, but he accepts the tender kiss Joe gifts him in apology as he turns in the circle of Nicky’s arms. 

“Don’t apologize, either,” Nicky hums when they pull away. “It is... hard to accept. That this is how it is.”

“He should have said something. Should have told us.”

“I know.” Nicky can’t smooth away the hurt on his love’s face, can’t kiss it away or will it from his weathered expression. Joe will feel this way for a long time, even as he gets better at swallowing it down. 

Joe doesn’t say more. He doesn’t have to, as he curls closer into Nicky’s chest, resting his cheek on his shoulder. His arms come around Nicky’s middle, returning the embrace, sinking into familiar, comforting habits. They didn’t have to talk to know. They didn’t have to speak to understand that this hurt.

Nicky can’t let things lie, though. This was more than a simple wound, a death, a tally that was once more out of balance. He had one more death over Joe, now. One imperfection in the perfect synchronicity he had found long ago with this man.

“Tell me,” he says, quiet, barely a whisper. He turns his face into Joe’s hair, his happy place this space right behind his ear. Joe is warm and smells like the honey soap he bought, always so sweet. Joe melts, just a bit, but his body is held stiffly, firmly, against Nicky’s own.

“No,” Joe says. But this is not as firm a conviction as his body. Nicky aches, for both this pain they must learn to absorb and for the way he must pull it from Joe, like a bullet from a wound closing around it.

“ _Habib albi,_ ” Nicky tries again. _My sweetheart, my lover_. It had been the first thing Joe had said that Nicky understood, when their swords had long since been abandoned, when mutual ground had been reached. They circled each other, afraid and unsure. Greek had been their common language before, but this, this little endearment, spoken as a question and an answer. Nicky had understood, then. Maybe he had always known.

Joe is not so moved. He clings to Nicky, his strong fingers digging and twisting into his shirt. Nicky steps away and tosses it off, removing that barrier for Joe to exact his violence on. He will not do it against Nicky’s skin, has not since that first week they met. Nicky slides back into Joe’s arms and his fingers are gentle where they were before, caressing instead of scratching.

Nicky doesn’t have to push any longer. He knows what Joe is seeing, what his perfect artist’s eye is conjuring for him now: Nicky, dead and bloody. Nicky, carved apart and whimpering on the table. Nicky, unconscious on the van floor, dead for all Joe knew. He does not need to ask to know what Joe sees when he clenches his eyes shut.

It comes in spurts. Nicky pulls him down to bed, kicks off both their jeans and shoes and wraps the blankets around them as tightly as he can. It will become too warm with them both, but they don’t care. They have long since stopped trying to sleep apart.

“This,” Joe croaks eventually. His thumb swipes across Nicky’s nape, through his hair. His face rises from where he’d been hiding it against Nicky’s neck, wet with tears. Nicky had been able to keep his own at bay, but seeing Joe cry — he can’t help it anymore.

“You — the sound you made,” Joe continues. Wrecked, torn. Nicky kisses away the tears on his cheeks even as his own spill down to meet them. “You couldn’t have been dead more than a minute, but Nicolò, my love, you must know —“

“I do,” Nicky manages. His voice sounds broken, coming up his throat ragged. “Believe me, I do. But I didn’t feel it. It was quick.”

“That is _not_ the point.” Joe’s hands on him tighten. But they don’t bruise. They never have. “Booker allowed it to happen. He wanted it to. He wanted it to save _himself_.”

Nicky sighs. Takes a deep breath, tries to fight through his own tears and heartbreak to the center of himself where he can ignore it all, at least for a while. Joe needs it. He needs safety, and comfort. A kiss was what he wanted, but reassurance did not come on the back of simple solutions.

“Yusuf, look at me,” Nicky says tightly. He lays back so Joe can, shifts so they can see each other fully. Joe’s wet eyes are a mix of pain and heartbreak, righteous in his fury and devotion. Nicky would let him loose like he desperately wants, but that wouldn’t solve anything. Things are said and done. Already their careful machinations are in motion, and there is no stopping them now.

So Nicky makes himself look. Makes Joe look, too, cupping his bearded jaw, careful always in his touch on this man. He wipes away the wetness on Joe’s cheeks with his thumbs, staring at his other half as if for the first time.

“I know this is hurting,” Nicky says quietly. “I know you’re angry. Believe me, I am too.”

“He should have said something,” Joe whimpers.

“He should. But Yusuf, my love, my darling. Please. Nothing is your fault. You couldn’t have known that what he harbors in his heart was so dark. Yes, he should have come to us, should have relied on his family to help. But he is his own man and he made his choices. They hurt us, so we must allow the punishment to play out.”

Joe swallows. “We couldn’t have done anything.”

His voice lilts at the end. A question disguised as a statement. Lord, does Nicky love this man, but sometimes he wishes he could absorb himself in his wonderful brain and make him understand.

“ _You_ are not at fault, Yusuf,” Nicky says firmly. “There was nothing you could do. Nothing.”

“Nothing.”

“ _Il mio tutto_. Nothing. This is on one man, and his name is not Yusuf.”

Joe stares at him for a long time. Nicky stares back, unwavering, unmoveable. He could lay here and stare for as long as the Earth kept turning, and then forever more — nothing would keep him from searching for Joe’s beautiful gaze. Nothing would keep him from trying. Not even Joe himself.

They have fought and bled thousands of times, killed and died for things long gone now. The people they saved have passed, sand and time taking with it what it doesn’t leave behind, rendering most of what they have done completely useless in the eyes of most. But after Merrick — after seeing Copley’s wall, after seeing the dots connected in a way he hasn’t ever seen before — Nicky knows. 

Fate, or whatever force drives them — whatever keeps them from aging or perishing like Booker so longed for — has kept them here for a reason. They help, even though they don’t see it. Andy helps. Joe and Nicky and Booker help. Nile does too, now. And it is their duty to carry on even though there aren’t concrete answers why.

But Nicky knows why. For the world, for the people he will never meet generations from now — but also this man. Yusuf, his sun, his partner, his lover, husband, other half, soul, reincarnation — whatever this man is. He is all and he is more. He always will be, with all the light from the stars in the sky. There is nothing Nicky wouldn’t do for this kind, bleeding heart in his hands. 

“Thank you,” Joe croaks. He’s exhausted, bone weary and so, so ready to just sleep. Nicky nods, leaning forward to kiss him. Joe meets him halfway, eager and without restraint.

He loves this man. Loves him beyond the end of everything. Could not imagine a world without his kindness and quick wit, even now when they’ve been brought to their lowest.

“Please don’t take this upon yourself,” Nicky murmurs. He kisses up Joe’s cheek, his temple, then comes back down to his lips, his chin, the corner of his mouth.

“I can’t help it,” Joe says with a little depreciating laugh. “You know me.”

“I do. My Yusuf, always so strong. Trying to carry it all. Please, I beg you, let someone else try this time.”

He doesn’t mean to sound so hurt, but Joe’s arms tightening around him are answer enough. He returns the embrace, unable to stop kissing him, even when the bone-deep ache of sleep deprivation settles inside him. Joe picks up where he left off, his beard scratching and tickling Nicky’s eyelids as he mimics the circuitous path Nicky took around his face. The last thing he feels is Joe’s warm lips against his own, murmuring nothings, his sweet voice a pleasant caress lowering him down to a deep sleep.


End file.
